


Slice of Life: Plastic Sister Cities

by AimeeWolv



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, F/M, Future Janejake, Future Rosemary, God this is going to be an ass to write, M/M, Multi, slice of life fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2018-12-02 10:18:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 49,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11507376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AimeeWolv/pseuds/AimeeWolv
Summary: "Forgetting is good for the brain: deleting unnecessary information helps the nervous system retain its plasticityMeeting Roxy Lalonde was like meeting a storm.Well.If you knew how to appreciate a storm that is."





	1. No plastic cities

**Author's Note:**

> This is a dirkroxy fic that is based around (But not quite yet) a roleplay I had last year (2016) and eventually progressed into a long running fic. It's been a while since I wrote as either of these characters like this so I'm definitely rusty, but if I'm not doing an absolutely atrocious job do let me know. This is going to take place looking at snapshots of their life, starting at a a young age and getting older. There will be jumps forward in time between chapters.  
> I also wrote this because God be damned I will fill this Dirkroxy tag on my own if I have to.

Welcome to the beautiful Lalonde family.   
No one is a criminal.   
No one is an addict.   
No one is a failure.   
  


**

Welcome to the successful Strider Bro’s Co.   
No one is a criminal,   
No one is a plastic city,   
No one is a failure

 

**

Houston, Texas. Hot, sunny, and a hell of a lot better than whatever backwater town Bro was making us move to. I didn’t see the point in it. He said it was ‘to stop paps from straight up harassing [Us],’ we both knew that was a lie. It was an easy place to pass me off for a while instead of  _ him _ getting pestered by journalists about this mysterious brother of his, this kid he’s forced to look after. That’s what it was. Even I, fresh faced at twelve, could see it.

I’d been seeing it my entire life.

**

Forgetting is good for the brain: deleting unnecessary information helps the nervous system retain its plasticity

Meeting Roxy Lalonde was like meeting a storm.

 

Well.

If you knew how to appreciate a storm that is.

 

I first met Roxy when we were ten years old. Bro and I had come down from the Texas heat to one of the big cities, Roxy and her mother had come all the way from Rainbow Falls. Her mother said that it was so she could get a proper taste of that ordinary school life. Bro said the same thing. We both later figured out they’d both just needed to get rid of us for a few hours every day to work.

 

A few hours turned into more.

Turned into days.

Sometimes weeks.

Months on some rare important occasion. If you define rare as, at the very least, six months a year. Sometimes in a row, sometimes spread out.

 

When I met Roxy she was probably the most innocent she’s ever been. With cute butterfly clips in her hair, and the knock off light up sketchers she’d begged her mother to buy for her when they came to the city.

 

She told me that same day I met her, her mother had said there were better pairs of shoes to find.

 

She told her mother that there wouldn’t be another pair of shoes like that in the entire goddamn world.

 

Not in those words.

Roxy could barely say ‘darn’ around her at that age.

 

We and our guardians both stood in the front office of that school, Bro had been texting away to one of his producers, or maybe some actor. A starlet he wanted to fuck later in the week. Something like that. He’d given me some portable DVD player, put on some stupid colourful horse show like he expected it to distract me thoroughly enough to not demand his attention and tear it away from whatever he was doing on that phone.

 

And fuck the guy.

It worked perfectly until Roxy got antsy and her mother wasn’t enough to distract her while we waited.

 

One thing I can say is that Roxy’s mother was a bombshell.

She had hair that looked like they’d taken the stars and melted them down into some bleach or dye and put it right on top of some pure silver that’d been fashioned into a wig for Pandora herself. She had this gloriously smooth umber skin. There was something about her though that, even at the age we were then, was pretty damn intimidating. Like she knew far more about everyone in the room than that person knew themselves. Might’ve been the whole dark and foreboding thing she was going for. Considering the kind of books that she wrote, which I only found out well into the year.

 

I ended up pouring over them late at night, analysing them like there was nothing else in the entire world that would help me get closer to understanding Roslyn and Roxy Lalonde.

 

Roxy was different to her mother, if you looked at them and blurred your vision a bit you’d think that they weren’t even related at all.

 

Where Roslyn was sleek and proper, Roxy had this excited air about her. This boundless energy and obvious, obvious happiness. Roslyn’s hair was sleek, put into a short bob. At this age her hair hadn’t been cut yet, hadn’t been straightened and given curls and twists instead of being left kinky. No, then she had two thick braids, this wild curly hair at the end of them. Her mother had these cunning eyes, almost constantly a bit narrowed. Roxy had eyes that reminded me of some badly photoshopped image of the sun that someone had turned pink, bold and vibrant, wide, but unnatural in colour.

 

They were  _ too _ vibrant, _ too _ bold.

 

They had the same skin, but if you didn’t look at the structure of their noses, the same pouty lip, those cheekbones, you wouldn’t know they were from the same family.

 

I’d gotten through at least three or four episodes of that stupid old generation My Little Pony, (goddamn it Applesauce or Applejack, whatever, don’t jump off bridges like that), when Roxy bounded over. Releasing herself from her mother’s grasp to wander on over to us. She sat herself right next to me on the office’s couch. Leaning right against me, almost pressing me against Bro, as she tried to have a look at what I was watching. She pointed to the screen, twelve year old fingernails painted this metallic pink. It wasn’t messy, the less messy it was the more likely her mother had done it. Or, later, me.

 

“What’re you watchin’?”

 

She wasn’t loud yet then, didn’t have a voice bursting and full of life, and love, and happiness. But she had a nice voice still. Just at a normal volume and pace.

 

“I dunno.” I did know. But what kind of kid was going to admit they were watching a show made for three year olds in the principal’s office? Especially considering this was a new school entirely. After settling in? Fuck, maybe.

“Some show Bro put on.”

 

“Don’t put it on me, li’l man, you’re the one that likes it.” His voice was absent, trying to seem like he was barely listening. It took me a few years to tell the difference between disinterested and trying not to seem interested. Almost directly proportional.

 

Still, when he spoke I flushed red and a giggle came from the girl beside me. I scowled at Bro, he’d only given a slight smirk in return.

 

I didn’t have time to salvage my reputation before the principal called the Lalondes to him. Roslyn’s slender hand grabbing her daughter’s and gently guiding her into the room. She winked and waved at me before her mother pulled her away.

 

Once they were gone I slid down in the seat, hands over my face and groaning. First day and already Bro had made me into some joke. It was just like back home, which I still wasn’t happy about. In my opinion, Texas had been fine, ideal even. Who cared it was hot and far from where he set his home base to work. There was nothing wrong with Houston. It didn’t even matter that the arts co-ordinator and drama teacher really wanted to get close to the hot director/producer/writer/actor that sent his little brother to this school to get him out and about. It didn’t matter. I would’ve even taken being left at home to my own devices over moving down here.

 

…

 

It was cold here.

 

It wasn’t too long after the Lalondes went in and came out again (Roxy bouncing on her feet beside her mother) that we were called in. Strider Bros Crime Syndicate Co., the hottest and coolest pieces of shit this side of the goddamn galaxy. Pluto’s freezing space ass included. Bro didn’t grab my hand when we were called in, simply stood up, patting the top of my head to signal for me to stop moping and get up. I didn’t want to. But I did.

There were these two plastic, uncomfortable chairs in front of the principal’s desk. The wood looked like someone had tried to disguise something made from some cheap ass wood with varnish and darkening it.

 

Still looked like shit, wouldn’t say that to her face for a couple of months or so though.

 

She started off with some basic introduction to who she was, what the school valued, bunch of crap that I couldn’t even be half assed listening to even then. It was pretty much the same at every school: Don’t make us look like assholes. No problem. Easy as. Couldn’t if I tried. They’d do that all on their own.

Bro signed some forms, put down phone numbers to contact. Even if he put down his number, they’d have more luck contacting his assistants and then getting put on hold for a couple of hours than they would actually talking to the guy. It’s happened before. It’ll happen again. I couldn’t have too much faith in how readily available he was to help out or save me from getting into some shit with the school for some stupid reason. Karen did that more, and better, than he did. And I hated it when Karen filled in his guardianship duties.

Maybe I just hated he wasn’t the one doing it.

 

Regardless, the time in that office flew by quicker than a Strider can rap and rhyme. Then we were ushered out, principal following to meet us up with the Lalondes again. I only noticed then that Roslyn seemed taller than bro, probably would be even without the heels. Bro was pretty gangly, tall, but she seemed godly in a way. Powerful.

 

Yeah. ten year old me was already intimidated by her.

 

Roxy sidled on up to me when she saw me again, looping her arm through mine like a flesh and bone vine.

 

In later years, Roxy would tell me that vines were parasites. Wrapping around trees and other things to absorb nutrients from them and steal sunlight from them. Slowly killing their hosts, strangling them.

 

Roxy’s arms had never seemed to drain a single thing from me,

They gave more than they got.

 

She didn’t mention the horse show, My little Pony, only tugged me along with her after her mother and my brother. Talking about how exciting it would be to move to this new school, the new friends it would bring, the cool things we would learn. Even back then I could tell she was nervous and as unhappy about her move as I was.

 

Roxy Lalonde had been raised in captivity, in a cat zoo of a home on top of a waterfall. Her mother wrote books about wizards in a cozy study and Roxy wrote comics sometimes, one day she’d end up showing me, the satire and irony clear. She played dungeons and dragons with a slew of cats, dressed up as Harry Potter in her spare, spare time and played video games of all kinds. All while living within the glass walls of this cage of a house. Separate from the rest of her own kind. Not knowing a single thing about what it was like in a normal suburban neighbourhood, or in a normal suburban school.

 

Then again.

I guess I didn’t either.

 

Eventually Roxy stopped, unnoticed by the three adults in front of us. Letting go of my arm and holding out her hand for a handshake.

 

“I’m Roxy by the way, sorry, should’ve started off with that in the first place.”

 

“Dirk.” I shook her hand, a limp and loose ten year old’s handshake, “I’m Dirk Strider.” I almost expected her to ask about Bro, even then I’d bet a few of the other people at the school would recognize him by name, if not by his face. But she didn’t.

 

She didn’t watch too many movies, she’d admit to me later down the line, he didn’t make any wizard movies so she’d never heard of him before.

When she told me that, I decided right then that I would rather nothing else but to know Roxy Lalonde for the rest of my life.

 

“You from ‘round here or?” She didn’t have an accent that suited this area, but I guess neither did I. I thought that much was obvious. She had the strangest hint of British in her voice. Later she’d admit she used to watch Harry Potter more than she did anything else. Those movies helped her enunciate better she claimed.

 

I think her mother kind of forgot to do it herself.

 

“No. You?”

 

“No. Rainbow Falls actually! You?”

 

“Houston, Texas. You ever been?”

 

“No, actually! What’s it like in Houston, Texas?”

 

“Hot.”

 

Riveting conversation evidently. Nothing like it in the world. We were poetic masters at such a young age.

 

Bro and Roslyn salvaged us though, noticing how far behind we were and calling for us. They made this in-sync hand wave to draw us closer. We didn’t notice it at the time, honestly.

 

Roxy grabbed my hand, pulling us forward towards our guardians. Had to continue the principal lead tour after all.

We wouldn’t be starting today, we had nothing on us, of course. No books, no pencils or pens, no lunch either.

 

Not that Bro would make me lunch. For all I knew I’d have to do everything myself because he’d forget.

 

Forget he had a kid to look after.

 

Wouldn’t surprise me.

 

We got lead through the school, stared at through the windows in the doors of classrooms. Watched other kids whisper and gossip and point. Wondering if we’d be in their class. What kind of people we’d be like. I had a feeling I’d disappoint them.

We wouldn’t be those New Shiny Cool Kids they’d want, they’d want suave and smooth. Or rough and good at whatever sport was popular here, cricket? Seems like a cricket school. Or maybe they’d want another personality entirely. Something that fitted in a slotted with their personality and what they expected.

I didn’t want that.

 

Roxy Had. Certain issues with personal space. At the time I didn’t really get why, found it too awkward to ask why or to ask her to let go.

 

Living a life of isolation seems to keep someone from learning certain social cues. Then again, what did I know about how to avoid being awkward, that’s what the shades were for.

 

“Obviously there are certain rules about dress code, especially eyeware-” Speak of the devil and he shalt appear. “-Of course we can’t allow Dirk to wear his-”

 

“Non-negotiable.” Bro’s voice was ever monotone, but I could see that ever slight downturn at the corners of his mouth. The slightest hint of furrowing. He had my back on this at least, there was no way I was going to give my shades up for this school. I needed them, only the worthy could get a good look at these eyes. “Photosensitivity. He has to wear them.” I don’t know what about it made Roxy’s mom look doubtful, but there it was. She turned her head though, readjusting Roxy’s braids. Smoothing down loose hair.

 

“I- Of course. Of course. Moving on, hair is-” Roslyn looked to the woman. That sentence to this day remains unfinished, dying in her mouth every time she tries to bring it up to someone new. I’ve seen it happen before. She freezes up. It’s said that her hair gets greyer and her skin more sallow every time she tries. I could never tell if that part was true though. Never looked at her close enough.

 

Wordlessly she led us back to the office. Giving our guardians those final forms before sending us on our way.

 

That was my first goodbye to Roxy Yidhra Lalonde.

Yidhra. “...An Outer God who is worshipped as a beautiful, awesome and terrible earth-mother, similar to Shub-Niggurath  and might be connected to The Darkness...”

 

Roxy seemed like the least likely person to be connected to any kind of darkness. But what did I really know about Roxy Lalonde then? Not a fucking lot.

 

“I hope we’ll be in the same class! That’d be nice.”

 

“Yeah. It would. Get up to all sorts of crazy new kid bullshit together, ask teachers where the bathrooms are when we already know, start collecting gossip on why Jessica is such a slut, overthrow the Ukrainian government, try and get shit for cheap at the canteen. Normal stuff.”

 

“Lmao,” she said it out loud, actually said ‘lmao’ and fuck if I wasn’t going to find that some cute shit later down the line, “I’m hopin’ we’re gonna be havin’ that kinda fun. ‘Specially with overthrowin’ that government, can’t let ‘em govern and control the hopes of the people for as long as they have been. Somethin’ somethin’ beep boop bourgeois.”

 

Beep fucking boop.

 

Her mother lead her away. Bro ruffled my hair and clapped my shoulder to guide me back to the car he’d only recently really learned to drive.

 

“What’d you think of the school?”

 

“S’alright.”

 

“How’d you find the Lalondes?”

 

“Roxy’s alright.”

 

“Cute kid.”

 

“Yeah.”

 

The rest of the drive back to our new place was filled with rapping to advertisement music and songs that weren’t supposed to be rapped to.

Freestyling all the way like a streaker at a football game. Like a commander going commando on a mission through the Amazonian rain forest to root out Russian spies that’ve got some new nuclear tech designed to help them take over the free world, only to find out that the very government that sent you after that tech has tasked their special equipment they gave you to blow you up as soon as you have those plans. Leading you to wonder whether you should fulfill your patriotic duty or go back home to your wife, children, and eight cats in one piece.

 

Truly a difficult choice.

 

Our new place wasn’t anything like the old one. We hadn’t even really finished unpacking yet. The apartment we used to have was fine, cords and wires running all over the place. Bro’s turntables always somewhere different. A fuckton of swords on the walls that I wasn’t allowed to touch but did anyway when he wasn’t around to stop me. Hell, Cal liked it better back there too.

It was an empty house. Despite the unpacked and still packed boxes. The furniture, bought and brought. Despite the birdcage in the corner of one of the larger rooms and despite the cat that like to curl around Bro’s shoulders in the morning when he made his coffee in his dressing gown originally designed for sultry women in pornos, or forty year old widows who arranged for the murders of their late husbands. Bro was hopefully doing neither.  It was an empty house. Cold and empty.

 

Even the apartment, filled with just me, Li’l Cal, birdshit and the cat most of the time, was warmer and fuller than this place. I liked it better than this place.

 

But I didn’t have a choice.

 

No one who isn’t an adult living on their own really has a ‘choice.’

 

If you go away, you do what your parents or guardians tell you to do, go where they direct you, eat what they tell you and so on and on. You don’t have a choice until you’re ‘old enough’ to make your own choices. In which by then since you’ve been unable to do that because of the previous restrictions, you don’t really know how. So you blunder through life forcing yourself to make choices without knowing how and end up failing spectacularly until you get the hang of it. Wasn’t exactly the best system for mental health I’d say. But, what would I know. I was a kid then.

 

When we got home I didn’t storm over to my room and lock the door. Not. not right away at least. I knew how to play it cool, and I had to make this place as much mine as I did the last one. If I had to stay here I’d have to.

 

I grabbed a water bottle, big for a ten year old but small for an actual adult, and filled it with the only  _ real _ drink we had in the fridge at this stage. Juice that we’d mixed with soda water. Wasn’t the best, but Bro hadn’t gone out to get Fanta yet.

 

It’d do.

 

After that I visited by BirdShit’s cage to drop a couple more seeds into it.

“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

 

Bro needed to teach that bird some other words.

 

“Seize the means of production. Fuck!”

 

Mm. Maybe not.

 

I headed to my room after that. Now that BirdShit was fed I could do whatever I wanted in relative peace and quiet. Bro’s music would probably start up soon.

 

It wasn’t bad, I didn’t mind too much.

 

My room wasn’t quite up to standard yet, but it was better than the blank slate it’d been. Wires weren’t running everywhere yet. In later years, there’d be some of Roxy’s wizard statues strewn here and there. But not yet. The puppets were up in their piles, or strung up at the roof. I had my desktop setup, Bro got me a new TV when we moved. Big, attached to the wall. It was pretty damn good, admittedly. Even if the first movie he’d given me to go with it was one of his own shitty LD ones. It’d ended up being a mashup of the entire series, scenes from one movie plastered over another and mixed together. It’d been a nightmare to watch, only if you did it unironically.

Li’l Cal was waiting on the windowsill for me, my Katana (a ten year old’s birthday gift to himself) in his puppet-y precious hands.

 

I put the katana to the side, grabbing Cal and turning the TV on. Sitting down on the pile of mattresses that made up my bed at the moment. Sipping on the shitty makeshift soft drink as I flicked through the channels with Cal.

Despite myself I couldn’t help but wonder what the girl I met today was doing. Whether she had a house that was just as empty as this one was right now. Or if her mother had already filled it up and made it warm. How it was decorated. If her mother actually stuck around and they had conversation after conversation about the day. About the move. About empty and cold houses that only had empty and cold boys to fill them.

 

I doubted it.

 

Until a rock tapped the glass of the window.

 

When I heard it I almost spat out the shitty soft drink, holding Cal a bit closer before moving over to the window. Replacing the bottle with the katana before I looked down.

 

And there she was.

 

Two braids hanging over her shoulders, a manic grin on her face as she waved at Cal and I from below. She held a cat in a tuxedo in her arms, he waved his paw too. Cute.

 

I opened the window up, leaning out over it, shifting Cal so he had his arms around my neck from behind.

 

“Hi!”

 

“Yo.”

 

She shifted the cat in her arms to around her shoulders, it seemed rather complicit. Easy going. I didn’t want to know how Bro’s cat would react to the smell of it in my room. Once the cat was around her shoulders she started climbing up, tiny fingers finding holds in the smallest of grooves between the bricks that made up the outside of the house. I was pretty damn impressed honestly. Once she was close enough I reached out my hand for her to grab onto, pulling her up into my room. The cat jumped off and made itself at home on my desk.

 

“Did you follow us home?”

 

“Nope! We live nearby now here actually, and I saw the car your two got into so I thought I’d come say hi again. I’m Roxy, I said that before right? Sayin’ it again. I remember your name though! No need’t repeat it or nothin’.”

 

“Or anything.”

 

“What?”

 

“Nevermind.” Her lips twisted, dissatisfied with the lack of answer, or maybe because I’d corrected her. My ears felt warm. “Do you want to sit down or? We got shitty soft drink if you want it.” Her smile came back at that, waltzing her way over to the mattresses and sitting down. Patting the space beside her. I joined her.

 

“You gotta cool room! I’ve got the sneakin’ suspicion you like puppets.” I’d puffed up slightly when she called my room cool, about to say ‘just wait until everything is unpacked it will be even better,’ but ended up flushing for a second at her mention of the puppets strewn about everywhere. It wasn’t exactly an interest people usually had. “They’re kinda cute!”

 

Well that was a relief.

 

“Bro started buying them for me when I was younger. Creeped him out but I kept asking for them.”

 

“Hella. Where's your bro now?”

 

“Dunno.” Still in the house probably, even then I didn't really feel like introducing the girl who technically broke into my room to him. He always found some way to get anyone I knew under his thumb, ended up hanging with me to know him. And if she knew WHAT he did, I'd lose her as a proper friend quickly. “Probably working.”

 

“Cool! Don't need to worry ‘bout anyone gettin’ in the way then,” A worrying statement a murderer tends to make, “You got MarioKart? My mom’s. Busy. And MarioKart is amazin’ to get to know people with. You can skip out to my place!”

 

I hesitated.

 

I wasn't sure how well Bro would take that. And.

 

I wasn't even sure at the time if I wanted to get to know her right away. I had. A preference for the masculine in general. Everything about Roxy Lalonde screamed femme at the moment. From those braids and pink irises to the cats she'd obviously had her mother sew onto the bottoms of her jeans.

 

I had to admit it was nice handiwork.

 

“Uh. Well.”

 

“C’moooon, we're on the same street, I'll bother you every day ‘til you do it.”

 

“No way.”

** 

I ended up over at the Lalonde house the next day after school. Fitfully uneventful and filled with other kids talking shit.

 

I didn't fit quite in like bro said I would. I acted the same as I had last time. Stoic, aloof, the perfect Strider cool act. It'd worked great last time. But, I guess everyone had already known Bro then. Or perhaps being overly cocky and flaunting how much better I was at the same time might have been the problem.

 

Roxy fared better for a little while. Then she'd brought a thick book with her, some grotesque creature on the front. Messed with my eyes even through the shades. I guess she expected people to be impressed with it. Wearing her family's accomplishments proudly as if they were her own. I'd envy that later. And even later regret the envy. Some kid cried at the sight of the horrific book cover. Said it was wrong, that it kept changing.

 

The next year I'd get the volume that followed that book as a birthday gift. I had to agree. It wasn't exactly a normal book cover.

 

I kept it in a box for a couple years before trying to read it. I regret not reading it sooner.

 

Anyway.

 

I sat with Roxy on these two couches she'd pushed together and covered in pillows and blankets in her little den area. The house the Lalondes had moved in to was bigger than ours, but not by too much either.

 

When I went over to the Lalonde house, I'd expected I'd have to go pretty easy on Roxy.

 

I got absolutely fucking obliterated.

 

“Oh come on!”

 

“First place sucka!”

 

I couldn't believe it honestly. I thought playing Tony Hawk skater pro would make me some pretty boss ass gamer. Roxy had, as she put it.

 

“Pro strats, Dirk, pro strats.”

 

“Those aren't even complete words!”

 

She laughed from her chest, that kind of uncontrollable cackling. Hearty and loud. Unapologetic about her joy and amusement in every sense of the word.

An itch of  _ something _ started with that laugh. I just didn't know what it was yet. And wouldn't for a long time.

 

“I can't believe this. There is no way you're not cheating somehow. You have to be looking at my side of the screen.” I was scowling. But I wasn't mad at her either. I just hadn't expected her to be  _ good _ .

 

“Nuh uh! Pure skills here, Dirk, don't worry. Maybe someday you'll manage fourth place.” She gave me a wink and I rammed her shoulder gently with mine, sending her off course for a second or two. With an indignant gasp we returned right to the track. Shit talking each other like we'd been doing it our entire lives. Didn't feel like it yet. But it would.

Roxy's mother wasn't entirely aware her daughter was bringing home some kid from school while she was gone doing whatever Roxy's mother did. And Bro wasn't aware I was sneaking off after he dropped me home either.

If this were a movie, or a show, or a book one of our guardians wrote. Then it might have been a plot point. Separated due to distrust and lying and not letting the elders know what we were doing.

Funny thing really.

They never found out. They were never home to catch us in the act.

Not even by chance.

The awkward firsts of this new place and new school were easily forgettable. There weren't any cliche outsiders to adopt us, no cliche clique to torment us. I kept to the outskirts of the social circle at first and Roxy, strangely charismatic, drew attention to her like nothing else. Eventually I socialised more at her insistence.

We hadn't met Jake or Jane yet, I wonder what it'd’ve been like if we had.

Empty, cold houses remained empty cold houses with the Strider clan. We didn’t have the furniture or the need to fill up the entire space so we didn't and the Lalondes seemed to have too much and over filled before selling pieces off.

 

Bro bought a couch from the Lalondes.

 

It sits underneath my TV.

Days formed weeks, formed fortnights, formed months. Next thing I knew Roxy and I were turning thirteen. One day after the other. Bro and Roslyn let the two of us have a combined celebration.

 

Which really meant Bro had time to hit on other parents and Roxy's mother had time to sneak sips of alcohol when she thought no one was looking. I was always looking.

Roxy got me my first statuette of a wizard on our thirteenth, and a cap for Cal along with some last bits and pieces I needed to start my biggest project ever.

I handmade her a cat wizard toy and got off ebay a legit signed copy of the first Harry Potter book. That day she was so happy she said she could kiss me.

I told her that I knew she wouldn't be able to resist the utter charm and unmistakable sexiness this Strider had oozing off of me like pus from a really gross wound that got infected during the ‘Nam campaign way back when.

 

She told me I was gross and kissed my cheek anyway.

 

Bro teased me for a good week after about it.

I placed the grey scale wizard on a shelf where I could see it from my bed. It fitted perfectly. I couldn’t imagine a better place for it. And it made Roxy grin every time.

I guess I sort of loved that grin first.

One thing that I can say, unrelated to the Lalondes, was better than Houston,

Is that Bro was  _ around _ .

In a few years we’d head back to Houston for a year and Roxy would video call me every day and sometimes I could tell she’d cried beforehand from something her mother had said or during the call purely because she’d missed me.

In that year,

I’d find a fascination with those celebrity lookalike pages in magazines. People who were almost, but not quite, the famous stars we love to gawk and poke and point at like exhibits in a zoo. Pushing our hands through the gaps in the bars of their cages for a chance to pet them, to feel someone less than real.

And then I’d find the level mouth of a celebrity lookalike I wish I’d never seen before that day.

 

**

Dirk’s first year of small town life revealed that every summer Roxy disappeared, off on holidays to a family owned island. He had to admit, when she came back,    
  
holding up seashells and dry pressed flowers as trophies and wearing her family’s luck as her own,    
  
He was the slightest bit jealous.    
(Him, with all the Everything he had and all the bonuses he got,   
  
In future years he could’ve gone to those premiers of his Bro’s movies, did what Roxy did and wear his success like it was his

 

He didn’t)

**

Year two of this small town Dirk learned Roxy hid sadness in smiles and the more happy she seemed the more things she didn’t want seen. Sure, maybe it was some form of illusion, but if there was one thing he knew it was recognising his sister cities. 

 

**

Year three of small town life got cut short quick, it was July when his brother got the call to head back to Houston. He didn’t sell the house, no, not yet. But Dirk still felt like his time here was at an end anyway.

The way Roxy had refused to cry   
  
(She had so much practice showing that brave face but he didn’t know that)   
Her jaw clenching and face screwing up the slightest bit to hold it all back when he’d pushed her out of their hug to look at her.   


(He couldn’t break his face out of the stoney expression, constantly blank, constantly flat)

 

==> Dirk, Roxy: Age


	2. Celebrity Look-A-Likes And Pokemon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia is the scientific term for brain freeze. Contrary to myth, it can occur outside of the consumption of ice cream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took a while for me to do this because I'm lazy.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder.  
And fondness makes the absence even longer.

**

Forgetting is good for the brain.  
Forgetting is good for the brain.

Forgetting is not good for the people around you.

**

No one is a failure.

**

I was thirteen when Bro got the call back to Houston, Texas. He’d been asked to direct a long running TV show about some form of zombie or whatever it had been. He’d be there for the long haul and wasn’t able to leave me back there in that small town alone. He hadn’t sold the house so I’d had some form of hope the show would end quicker than expected and I could run right on back to a place where almost no one knew my face.

  
When I said goodbye to Roxy, unofficially, it had been when I broke into her house at one AM the day I found out we were going to be moving. I woke her up. Her hair had been taken out of her braids and it was. Everywhere. When she reached a hand between the curtains surrounding her bed and turned on her bedside lamp, the light cast a halo around all of that hair. Bro would’ve found it photograph worthy, probably would’ve gotten his Kodak Polaroid and snapped a photo then and there.

  
I didn’t like photography like he did. I barely passed that class because I just didn’t want to do it. But it only took a few days after settling back into the old apartment that I really wished I had taken a photo.

If I had, I might’ve filled that photo frame on my desk. Might have put it on the wall or stuck it by the mattresses that made up my bed. I could’ve saved it as my desktop wallpaper.

But that might’ve been a bit fucked up.  
It wasn’t like it would’ve been a photo of the both of us.  
Still.

I would’ve liked something to help solidify that image of her in my mind. Before we both got older and started branching a bit more.

There was always one thing I could look forward to in Houston, Texas. Something that the small town I’d met Roxy Lalonde in didn’t have on it, beyond all the other things a small town couldn’t have on such a large city.

Trashy magazines and their celebrity look alike pages.

It might’ve been ironic at first, seeing all those people who looked like other people and get celebrated for it. Congratulations, you look like Oprah without any of the personality, permanent fame, and money. Have a sticker and a spot on a magazine page that’ll go largely unnoticed.

They were, but weren’t quite, the people everyone looked up to in their plastic lives as they ran about like ants. Physically similar to the people we’d up hold as Gods and made dance and perform for us.

Their faces had the same designs, the same hostile architecture and gothic arches, the same stained glass windows and the same floor plan. The same streets, highways, routes. But different people living inside, identical sister cities, with none of the personality. A shallow recreation.

A city for ants.

It was early in the year. A mailman had dropped a stack of shitty magazines on the doorstep while I’d slept in that Saturday, Bro was out of the house.

Bro, Dad, whatever. He never made it clear.

Bro was out and I had a stack of magazines on the table in the lounge room waiting for me. The most I did that morning was probably style my hair, brush my teeth, and pretend I’d showered before taking the magazines to my room and sitting down on my bed with them. I opened up the first one, skipping right to the celebrity lookalike page. Oprah, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jay Z, some irrelevant b-list celebrity, and a few others I probably couldn’t name if I tried. Uneventful, even as I traced my fingers over the cheekbones of the largest picture of the lot. I couldn’t help but wonder about their life, did people flock to them purely because they looked like such and such celebrity? Did they hope that their lookalike status would help them get through life? Did they like their lives? Did they envy the human made God that they wounded up looking just like?  
I almost wished I could’ve asked them, their pictures, and gotten a reply.

  
I picked up the next one, the first discarded to start a pile of To-Read-Later.

I flipped the pages, scanning over the celebrity lookalikes until my eyes locked onto one particular picture.

Looked at a plateau-mouth, and sunglasses of a kid named Dave, and felt a wash of ocean water go through my chest.

Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia is the scientific term for brain freeze. Contrary to myth, it can occur outside of the consumption of ice cream.

A rising, glamorous shooting star wouldn’t have any shortage of partners.

Nor a collection of people to call their own.

I pushed the magazine off of my lap, off of the bed, and scattered the rest of them along with it. Finding places among tangles of wires, dirty clothes that missed the hamper and puppets that had fallen from their places.

So many days alone.  
Weeks alone.  
Months alone. Months spent fucking alone. Waiting for him to come back, to look up to him and admire him for everything that he’d done despite how long he kept me fucking waiting to see him.

All that time he’d been…

I pushed my back against the wall, knees rising up to my chest and hands burying in my hair. Ruining all I’d done to it before grabbing those now abandoned magazines. Pressure built up behind them, I didn’t notice I was crying until I felt my lips pulling back and forced myself to keep down a wail. Gasping softly as fat and hot tears started rolling down my cheeks and staining the skin they rolled off of.

I didn’t even know if he’d be home that day, that week, that fucking month.  
I didn’t even know if I wanted to see him home. If I wouldn’t have ignored him, told him blatantly that I knew, or would’ve just tried to lock him out the apartment.

I didn’t know what to do.  
I didn’t know what the fuck to do.

I sat there for who knows how long before I picked the magazines up, finding the one with Bro’s…

I found the magazine with the kid called Dave in it, and tore out the page. Stuffing it into Cal’s cap before I got rid of the rest of the magazines. Tossing them into the trash, tearing out the lookalike pages and throwing them out the window. Watching them flutter and fall to the streets below like the leaves in autumn. Some landed on roof tops, others made it to the street or got blown too far for me to tell where they landed.

I cancelled the magazine subscriptions.

That was the last time I read one of those pages for a very, very long time.

I couldn't look at Bro the same way, not quite. I kept wondering if when he looked at me, if he was comparing me to his other kid. If he wished that it was him standing there instead of me.

It made me feel sick.  
For a while,  
I hated him, and myself.

During the year away I was more often found wandering the set of the show that tore me away from that empty and small town.

I hated it, I’ll admit it.

I hated the show for existing, for uprooting me again and forcing me away from the first person who hadn’t known Bro and, by extension, me and only wanted to know us for that.

I hated it for taking up even more time than any of his work normally took up as well. I hated every moment I was there instead of at the school I’d been re-enrolled in because I knew every single second was a second that I wasn’t supposed to be there and Bro didn’t notice.

The school would’ve called of course, and he’d get the memo eventually and then he’d have to re-arrange his schedule to allow enough time to ask me what the fuck I thought I was doing wandering away from school and potentially getting him in some shit with the law.

I didn’t care.

But I stopped running away from the school eventually.

Roxy and I skyped every single day. She started the calls when she was getting ready before school because she knew I’d be awake anyway, and I started the ones after I got home from school because I knew she would still be up playing Pikmin.

I got her that game for Christmas one year.

She fucking loved it.

On the weekends we ended up in a video call for the entire day, unless we had other things planned. Even if we didn’t end up talking for the entire time, we still kept the call going. More often than not Roxy took a nap during the middle of the day and I ended up counting how many times she’d have to shove Jaspers off of her face in her sleep.

Seventeen times on March eighteenth.  
Five times on May twentieth.  
Ten, July twelfth.  
One, September nineteenth.  
Zero, October first.  
Two, November fourth.  
Ahem.

On the weekends, Roxy’s eyes were sometimes red. That was common, she never said why. But it wasn’t hard to tell she’d been crying,

She admitted later it was because it was because she missed me, seeing me on the screen made me feel even further away.

Years later and I felt guilty for leaving her alone for that year,

Not in the same sense she disappeared for part of the year and dragged off to that family summer home, no.  
Not because she cried.

But because it took a few years for her to admit to the shit that had happened during that year.

How Abrahamic gods made the skies rain red and glass, and worked in their mysterious ways. Offering up the innocent, the unknowing, the blissfully ignorant, to the heavens above and making the sacrifices without their consent. Without their knowledge.

How small minds in small towns turned to small and sharp words.

Even if I didn’t love her then,

She was so beautiful in so many ways and didn’t deserve the shit she went through.  
She was my best friend.  
(At fifteen she’d learned everything she could about a subject she wasn’t even taking to help me pass it,  
That same year she talked me down from running away from Bro and had me spend every night at her place for month’s right under our guardians’ noses.  
She bought me lunch for the entire year because she was of the opinion my food sucked,  
And it’s kind of true,  
It did back then.)

“Soooooo, how was your borin’ ass school today?”

She wasn’t playing what she usually did this time, no weird alien creatures flipping through the air, maybe her mother had gotten her something recently. But why would she? I don’t think even Roxy remembers the last time her mother just got her something like that out of the blue. Maybe she was trying to make up for something? Had Roxy gotten an award? I didn’t remember her having of mentioned anything like that recently.

I hadn’t realised I didn’t answer Roxy’s question until she tapped on her mic, jolting me from my thoughts and questions over such a stupid deviation from the routine.

“Sorry. What was that again?”

“I saiiiddd, how was school?” She rolled her eyes, I could feel my ears getting hotter at being caught out not quite listening to her.

“Oh. No school today. Vacation started, I’m trying to see if Bro will let me head back to the old house for the next few months.” She perks up at that, subtly. Straightening the slightest bit, hair free of braids and bouncing. My eyes flickered to the corner of the screen when she moves. I frowned.  
There was something colourful on the TV cabinet in her room.

I feel an icy chill down my neck. She’s saying something. What is she saying? The words aren’t reaching my ears. Hyper focused on the fucking card on her TV cabinet.

It’s a fucking birthday card.

I forgot her birthday. World class fucking asshole right here.

How could I have of forgotten? I’d been planning something for it for a month or maybe five and I’d forgotten completely. Hadn’t even completed the gift. I took a guilty side glance to a tangle of wires and half-heartedly shaped metal. Why hadn’t I finished it? What kind of asshole had I been to just quit the project in the middle, to forget it despite how important it was.

I turned my attention back to Roxy. She didn’t have the same kind of ever blank face that my family did. But she did have an expression like it in her own right. She still had tells. The slight curling at the right corner of her mouth. She knows. Knows I wasn’t listening, knows I might have forgotten. There’s only one thing to do.  
Lie.

“I didn’t send a present, I was thinking about taking it down with me when I come to visit. So I can see how much you cream at the very sight of its complete extravagance and next level artistry.”

She snorts and I feel relieved. She believes me and that’s what matters.

Doesn’t mean that it feels good to lie. What kind of asshole forgets something like this when the days are filled with nothing but monotony? It should’ve been a blessing to work on it.

But I did forget.

I end the call early with guilt grabbing onto my intestines and turning them into knot after knot in an attempt to punish me for my wrongdoings. It’s the first time I’ve felt this bad and wouldn’t be the last either. It’s motivation for the most part.

I grab the tangle of metal and wires and sit at my desk. Taking a moment to look at the mess before me and inwardly wince. I hadn’t taken as much care of it as I’d thought, all the wires matted together and the metal a bit dusty.

I wipe the metal clean and set to separating certain wires before resuming the work I’d put down God knows how long ago.

I start twisting the pieces and parts into place. It slots perfectly, as expected. Every part finding its place and losing myself in the mechanical work of it all is relieving. Grab a part, check it’s the right one, put it into place, make sure it won’t come off, rinse repeat. Repetitive and therapeutic. Why had I stopped? Right then, I couldn’t be sure.  
My hand reached for the last piece to finish the skeleton and plating, finding nothing but empty space. I reached again, patting down the desk.

The last piece.

Where was the last piece?

I could’ve sworn before I started every piece was there, it wasn’t possible for it to have of suddenly disappeared. It had to be on the desk. I looked up from the incomplete machine, scanning the desk over. Oil everywhere, useless wires coiling at the edges of the desk. Picture frame of Roxy and me. No last part.

No last part.

  
A cold feeling washed over me. Like a frozen tentacle had wrapped around my limbs and organs, coating me in rancid slime and mucus with the intent to squeeze me to death before dragging me to the bone hard maw to crunch my bones and tear the skin off of my flesh before devouring me, starfish style.  
Admittedly that would make the entire mouth thing fairly useless if it was done starfish style but it’s the thought that counts.

  
My nails dug into the palm of my hand, short and torn as they were, as I sat there wondering how I could be that careless and that much of an idiot.  
I was tempted to sweep it all off the desk, to abandon the project again and just come clean that I was an asshole who had forgotten Roxy’s birthday. Some friend I was. There was no wonder Bro was gone so often, had this other kid I’d never even met. He had plenty of cause, I couldn’t be a good friend to the one person who had done nothing wrong to me, why would he think I could be the perfect fucking son for him.

He probably wished he’d had Dave first, publically, that I was the one in the magazines as a lookalike. Someone not quite there, but definitely close enough to get the tiniest picture on that page.

I stood up, pushing myself away from the desk before I ended up crying. I took a screwdriver and stuffed it into the pocket of my jeans before leaving the room.  
I went through the kitchen, pulling appliances out and checking them over. I pulled them apart, grabbed things from them and put them back together like nothing ever happened. I’d tell Bro’s assistant that they had stopped working in the morning and she’d order more to arrive before he spontaneously showed up in the next few months. Bro would never even be able to tell the difference. He didn’t see them as often as I did.

I brought all the pieces I’d ripped from the kitchen back to my room, tossing the screwdriver onto the desk before I looked over the parts again.  
It took a few hours, but the pieces were contorted into that last missing element of Roxy’s present. It was finished.  
It didn’t run like it was supposed to, might’ve sounded like I pulled apart a toaster to make it, but it did the basic movements of a cat stretching and walking and that was what mattered.

I pulled fabric over the top, cutting, stitching and gluing it over the metal pieces.

A custom made toy cat for one Roxy Lalonde.

A four-eyed one, but goddamn if it didn’t look like a fucking cat.

I pulled out an old moving box, small and an okay-ish size for it, and half filled it with fabric before putting the toy inside and covering it with more fabric. I’d wrap it up in paper later and pretend that I’d had it all this time and hadn’t finished it the day I’d been reminded of her birthday. I pushed it under my bed and stood up to warm up some shitty microwave meal that the cupboards were stocked with for the days I couldn’t be bothered walking down to a supermarket to have an actual home cooked meal.

It was some form of chicken curry in a cup.  
It wasn’t that bad.

The rest of the night was uneventful like all the nights before it.

I started going to bed earlier than before, not bothering to wait up at god knows what hour for Bro to come home and watch him stumble to the couch or to his room.

To be called Dave in a potentially drunken stupor.

I should’ve known in hindsight really. From the get go. From the first time it had happened at six years of age. I suppose it just seemed like a silly game then.

**

It was a week later when Bro took me down to the airport--  
Well. When Bro arranged for me to go down to the airport with his assistant. She helped me organise everything, got on the plane with me, paid for inflight movies with Bro’s money. The entire time I clutched the box with Roxy’s present in it to my chest, Bro had arranged for it to get through security and onto the plane with me.

My legs bounced up and down the entire flight, and from the way Bro’s assistant looked at her Xanax, it was probably annoying her. Or she thought she ought to shove some down my throat to calm me down.

It wasn’t that I’d never been on a plane before, I’d been on thousands while Bro lugged me from place to place and pushed me back to the previous place again and again. I just.

I didn’t want to disappoint Roxy.  
But I did really want to see her.

Houston was lonely without her bright flash of teeth and the tuxedo wearing cat she carried around with her when we weren’t in school. I missed her voice and how she’d hang over my shoulders when she spotted something interesting on my computer, or how we’d just sit or lay next to each other watching dumb movies. I miss losing at Mario Kart to her and beating her in Mortal Kombat.

The plane ride was long, and filled with recently released movies the company had bought to entertain passengers with the cash to spare. There was little turbulence, and it was over and done with quickly. Well, relatively quickly. It might’ve been longer to fly to Australia, for example.

The town’s airport was small, and getting out was easier than it was getting in Houston’s airport. Bro’s assistant drove us to the house, neither of us really saying a word to each other. She tried to make conversation, asking about Roxy. I suppose I could’ve been kinder, actually responded and acted like I wanted to talk to her. Rather than giving grunts and one word answers. She was no Bro, but that didn’t mean I had to take my frustration out on her at the time. It wasn’t like she’d of volunteered either, Bro had probably pointed to her out of a selection of his employees and said “Go look after my kid for me.” it wasn’t her fault, she had has little choice as I did. I should’ve been nicer.

I was just a kid.

When we got to the house and she’d unlocked the door, I helped her unpack everything. Pulled suit cases from the car and put them inside the house to be unpacked as needed. We set up chargers for our respective phones and laptops before she went through the kitchen. Tossing out food Bro had left behind and had gone bad. She said something about stocking the kitchen up and left with the car.

I took the box with Roxy’s present in it, opened it up to check on it. Everything still worked and hadn’t been damaged. Good, good.

The box had been wrapped in pink paper. I’d take money out of Bro’s wallet when he was sleeping and then left the apartment to go buy it. It’d been worth it.  
I picked the box up after putting everything back inside and carried it down the stairs, out the front door and towards Roxy’s house. Her mother’s car was out the front. They were home at least.

I walked up to their front door, putting the box down by my feet and fixing my hair. Only after I was sure I was ready did I knock on the door. It took a minute, maybe two, before the door opened. Roxy’s mother, tall, pretty, and imposing, towered over me.

“Dirk, this is a surprise.” Her tone made it seem as though it wasn’t at all and that she knew every mistake I had made in every year of my life along with all future ones. “Roxy’s in her room, you know how to get there, yes?” Of course I did, the amount of times I snuck into that room and the amount of times I’d gone in properly were astronomical. I nodded.

“Yes, Ms. Lalonde.” I picked the box back up as she stood to the side, scampering away from her and up the stairs to Roxy’s room. I didn’t knock on her door, knowing very well she was probably playing a video game and wouldn’t have heard me anyway. I pushed the door open with my hip, the box taking up the use of both of my arms.

It happened too fast to comprehend really. One moment I was holding a box and stepping foot into Roxy’s room and the next the box had been pushed onto a nearby closet top and Roxy had her arms wrapped around my waist. Her hair unbound by hair ties, coily and reminiscent of an angel’s halo. My arms were held sort of awkwardly in front of me, forgetting to wrap themselves around her in return for a few seconds before I returned her tight embrace. Fitting us back together like we had when I left, like a jigsaw with only two pieces.

I buried my face in her halo of hair, and gripped on tight. Never wanting to let go of her. It felt good to be here again, no matter how short the time spent here was. It felt so fucking good to be with someone who didn’t have another version of me waiting for them, who didn’t say Dave when they came home, who was around.

Someone who wanted me around.

I mustered out a weak “Hey” after a while, face still buried in her mass of hair and her face pressed against the crook of my neck. I could’ve stayed there for years. “Happy birthday, Rox.”

“Happy birthday, you big ass.”

I laughed. A good, and genuine laugh which probably helped keep back the emotions that all the time we’d spent apart had created. Reluctantly, I let go of her and picked the box up, pushing it between us so that she’d take it.

“Here, for your birthday.” I stepped back, she knelt down on the floor to open the box up. She pulled out the first few layers of fabric, tossing them at me when she got sick of pulling them out.

Then she lifted out the homemade toy cat. I felt the world stop.

What if she knew that I’d forgotten about it?  
What if she didn’t even like it in the first place, what if she already had one like it from an actual factory that knew what they were doing? She just kept staring at it. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, I was almost regretting just not buying an actual gift for her.

She grinned and hugged me tight again. I felt that worry wash out like the tide and returned the grin with a small one of my own.

“You like it?”

“‘Course I do! Look at it! They’re so cute, Dirk, oh my God.”

“Told you that you’d cream your underwear when you saw it, no one has anything on the pure mastery and artistry of this piece. Just fuckin’ look at it, those soulless eyes that speak of the betrayal we all feel towards capitalism, the colour of the fur indicating--”

“No.”

“Fair enough.”

The rest of the day, until Bro’s assistant came frantically looking for me when I didn’t answer my phone to come on home, was spent with Roxy and the toy cat. Teaching her how to operate it, and just catching up in general. There were new photos on her wall, most were Polaroids of the two of us. Hanging out, playing video games, stuff we usually did.

There was a twist in my stomach when I saw the other photos, pictures of her with some other guy. I didn’t know who he was then, and wouldn’t until sometime later, but the comfortable way he slung his arm around her waist and the goofy grins on their faces unsettled me in some way. I might’ve reasoned it as me being some jealous dickhead, or maybe just some form of feeling protective-- Possessive, over Roxy. That’s how I justified it then.

“Who’s the guy?”

“Who? Oh! That doofus. He’s, like, a kid I know because my mom sorta does some stuff with his grandma or whatever. Mom couldn’t go up to meet her, so this kid’s grandma took herself and him down here for the summer while they work together on something. He’s a total loser, though, and beatin’ him in Pokemon is soooo easy.” I winced, Roxy’s teams always seemed to be so damn overpowered somehow when it came to Pokemon. Despite the initial hostile reaction to finding out he existed, I couldn’t help but feel sorry he’d been subjected to that kind of loss at Roxy’s hands.

“You’re terrible, Lalonde.”

“You know it.”

I forgot about the guy after that, forgot to ask for his name and blocked him out until much later. It was hard not to forget him when Roxy was trying to challenge me to some game or other, luckily it was one I’d been practicing with back in Houston. Not that she knew.

I won the first couple of games, then Roxy really decided to come after my ass.

It felt like nothing had changed really, I almost felt like we’d be going to school tomorrow and I’d wait for her by her locker so we could walk to our classes together. Eat lunch under the tree near the cafeteria and watch the teacher on duty frantically pull a student out of one of the large bins. Or watch a fist fight over Magic cards.  
When Bro’s assistant came calling, Roxy’s head was in my lap and my hands were petting her hair. We weren’t really talking about anything, Roxy was fiddling with the toy cat and I’m pretty sure she was about to fall asleep.

I got in the shit that day with Bro’s assistant, and I’m sure Bro would say something about not doing that again if he remembered it the next time we saw each other again.  
But it was so fucking worth it.

For the next few days, it was that same formula. I told Bro’s assistant-- Whose name I learned was Brooke-- I was going out for the day and left for Roxy’s place. We spent the entire day together, and then I went home for dinner, got sent to bed, and Roxy either snuck into my room or I snuck into her room.

The routine was interrupted on a Tuesday.

“I’m going to Rox’s place.”

“Alright, have fun.” That was the general extent of Brooke’s and my conversations during the day before seven PM.

I ran to Roxy’s house that Tuesday, jumping over the hood of the car Bro had rented for Brooke while we were here and jogged across the street.  
There was a new car outside of Roxy’s house that day, an older looking one, straight out of a film. The kind you’re surprised to see on the roads during the weeks that some antique car show isn’t coinciding with. I ignored it, figuring it had something to do with her mother’s work and continued on my way inside.  
Her mother let me inside, got back to her work and I took the stairs, two at a time, to get to Roxy’s room. I could hear laughter from the top of the stairs. Not just Roxy’s either. That same twist of hostility turned my intestine to knots and rearranged my spine. I forced it down, forced the roads of my body back into place, stopped the wooden floors from buckling and opened up the door to her room.

Roxy was sitting on the rug in the middle of her room, cross legged and wearing a hat with cat ears on it.

There was a dark haired kid with her, sitting across from her, with dark messy hair and thickly framed rectangular glasses. He had some sort of jacket on, a weird and almost cartoonish skull decal on the pockets. It was the kid from the photos. Even from the doorway I could see those almost freakishly vibrant green irises. The kinds that photoshopped black cats have after people enhance the colours of their eyes and darken their fur to be edgy and witch-y.

The kid needed to learn what a hair brush was honestly.

His skin wasn’t as dark as Roxy’s, but he definitely wasn’t white. I learned later he was Polynesian, New Zealander to be exact, which explained a lot of his… Speaking style choices.

Roxy jumped up when she saw me, smile wide, and any hint of the way I felt about the break in this routine was carefully hidden away in a box in my head. Filed away under: Inexplicable jealousy and mild feelings of protectiveness.

“Dirk! Dirk, this is the kid I told you ‘bout, totes forgot t’tell you his name, sorry, but this is Jakey!”

“Well isn’t this the bee’s knees finally meeting the infamous Mr. Strider Roxy’s always going on about. Swell to meet you, chum! I could’ve sworn dear ol’ Roxy here was going to cast a kitten if I didn’t end up conversing with you at some point and what a good day it is for you to choose to be a crasher while I’m getting a hard-boiled earful from Roxy on ways to improve my Pokemon team. Ish kabibble I say on the topic.”

I had zero ideas as to what he had just said.

“Jake, could you for once in your entire life please talk in English for five seconds before I ruin any chance you ever have of playing another Pokemon game ever again.”

Despite Roxy’s… Her way of speaking, he didn’t seem to mind, only really grinning and punching her shoulder in a good natured fashion.

I kind of felt like Roxy had underplayed their relationship a little bit when I asked about him. ‘Just some kid,’ my fucking baby smooth ass.

“Good to meet you too, man. I’m hoping Roxy’s been retelling all of the times I’ve saved her ass from certain doom like a dope ass prince with his dick out wandering through the woods and covering the nearby forest in a light frost from the pure charm that radiates out of his asshole like the sun on a forty degrees Celsius day in any country that isn’t America.”

“I hate you both.”

I sat down with the two of them, hesitant and cautious of this Jake character but neither of them seemed to take any notice. Roxy leaned against my shoulder, and I put an arm around her instinctively. They carried on talking about how 'Nooooo Magikarp is nooot a legit Pokemon an' you, jungle boy, should know that.' I chimed in, surprising myself with how there were things I did agree on with Jake instead of Roxy. 

I suppose it really did surprise me it turned out to be fun. There were times I didn't understand a word Jake said, I think he threw in nonsense words in for the hell of it, but he was an alright guy. Friendly to a fault and more than enthusiastic about things. 

He did seem.

Pretty cool.

When I had to leave, 'least Brooke ban me all together from visiting, he asked if we'd be hanging out again soon.  
I said yes. He would have that honor of hanging out with the master of swordsmanship again sometime soon. 

He had a nice smile.  
It wasn't Roxy's smile with her slightly jutting out canines, but it was a smile that suited him. Buckteeth and all.

I left Roxy's house not feeling jealous like I assumed I would,   
I was rather happy for Roxy in fact.

** 

**== > Dirk, Roxy, Jake: Age.**


	3. Tired Director Finds No Solace, Should Probably Feed His Cat In The Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dirk's father-- Or brother depending on who you ask, takes some time to reflect on Dirk and other aspects of his life.

It wasn’t supposed to be a struggle.   
Life that was.   
Life behind and in front of a camera, getting the lighting just right and moving actors around like dolls, or pieces on a chessboard. Pawn to D4, Alex please say your goddamn fucking lines right before I replace you with myself.

One you step away from the camera it gets a bit harder. Navigating aristocracy of celebrities and talk show hosts, other directors, other actors, interviewers and paparazzi trying to figure out where the fuck you decided to live for the next few months. All the while trying to pay them off to leave your kid-- the one you kept-- alone.

The one you kept.   
Kept.

Like there had been too much choice. 

Thinking about it makes you feel sick to your stomach.    
You visited,   
Perhaps far too often.

It’s a cool night, surprising for the climate, but you find it a blessing. A salve for pale skin easily burned in the sun. the smoke from your cigarette curls and dances like the girl you’d tried to invite up to your room on a drunken bender the other week. Apparently she didn’t appreciate whiskey dick, not even from the famous director who had come to be so famous from dumb bullshit.    
Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff.   
Your most infamous franchise for all of it’s…   
Quirks.

It wasn’t that you didn’t love it anymore. The original concept was like your child, nurtured and grown and so very proud of it.

But there’s something about being asked to make more and more that takes everything out of it that you’d put into it.

Maybe you were just getting old. Old and tired. With little to keep you going beyond party favors, pretty people, and the knowledge that you’ve given your kid(s) a certain kind of lifestyle and want to keep that upheld. 

You, Daniel Strider, are a very bad person. You’ve kept one of your children in the dark about the other. You’re barely home. When you are, you’re probably a little wasted or a little high. Or sometimes you have company, other times you don’t. Sometimes you call Dirk Dave, and sometimes you don’t call him anything.

You weren’t meant to be a parent. You might’ve been better off alone--   
No.

Dirk might’ve been better off with someone else. Someone who could stick around and guide him in his life, who would’ve been there to put band aids on those knees of his when he scraped them.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

Maybe it would’ve been better if his mother had survived all these years instead of you. If they’d lived on royalties and the things she’d made rather than all the money your movies and shows bring in. 

Yeah.   
Maybe.

You stand on the balcony of the Texas apartment. It’d been another late night, and nicotine was more than needed for you to keep your patience with the stubborn and impatient actors that’d been chosen for you. You would fire them, if episodes hadn’t been aired already and you’re a stickler for consistency unless something serious has happened.

You kind of hope something serious does happen.

It’s a starless night. The only stars visible were the ones in the streets below or in the light windows of the other buildings. Of the other apartments. Each one housing a life. Maybe one or two held a pair of brothers, with the eldest who was around and wasn’t his father and the youngest who didn’t have any unknown siblings.

Perhaps there was a brother-- a father who did better than you did. 

Yeah.

You drop your cigarette, crushing it with the toe of your fancy dress shoes and turn to open the door to head inside.

Dirk’s passed out in his room, far as you can tell. Probably clinging to Cal as he does. The thought of the puppet makes you shiver, like in a far off place you’ve forgotten that you’d seen the thing before.

Whatever, didn’t matter.

You’re glad Dirk’s sleeping. Even when he was a real little kid he’d always have trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep. He’d wake up at all hours, wandering the house until you picked him up and put him back to bed or let him sit on your lap while you typed away at a laptop. He got older and getting to sleep came easier at times, and when it didn’t he didn’t leave his room anymore. Perhaps letting him have a TV, gaming consoles, and his computer all there in his room had contributed to that. You supposed it saved you worrying about whether or not he’d try wandering out of the apartment or house and away from you. You didn’t have the time, the--

You’d drop everything if he did. You couldn’t deny it to yourself. 

You sit down on the couch, feet on the coffee table as you searched for the remote and flicked through channels. The volume just one press away from zero. You really didn’t want to wake Dirk up.

As you flicked through channels you thought on him. Your son, your brother.

You couldn’t decide what you wanted to be to him.

You remembered his mother clear as day, with bouncy and fluffy golden hair and fingers that had a knack for fixing electronics and making things out of nothing.

Dirk’s mother might as well have of been the beauty to the beast. For all that you lacked, for the time she was around, she made up for. Far too good for you, and perfect for Dirk. A piece of genuinity surrounded by people with plasticine smiles. 

The good organ among plastic bodies.

She stood straight and tall, like there was no force on the Earth that could have of tamed all that wild heart. Approachable yet nothing shook the foundations that she build for herself. Sometimes she would talk, and talk. Oblivious but joyed to be given the chance to  _ speak _ . She had beautiful kind hands, built for playing instruments, but instead grew calloused with hard work. 

She had been the best part of you for a good long while. Perhaps she still is. Her memory spurring you on to sometimes try when it came to Dirk, when it came to seeing her eyes in his sockets. Golden as her hair.

But memories fade. 

The first time you didn’t think about her for a week, guilt at at you like vultures upon the liver of Prometheus. But Prometheus had done something good in his life. You? You forgot someone who made all of the good in you rise up out of the dust.

You wondered if she’d blame you for it. If she’d feel hurt.

You hoped to fucking God that she’d understand.

Perhaps it’s that fading memory of her that helps you keep away from the apartment and get busy. 

It had taken a while to get back into the groove of things. Your manager made excuses, but pressured you all the same to get to writing, to directing, acting.

You’d been busy spoonfeeding your son and trying to rock him to sleep at night. Watching his golden eyes light up at the colourful things you bought him and his chubby baby hands pulling at your clothes with sobs just past his slobbery lips when you clung to pictures of a dead woman.

He really had been a slobbery kid. More than one good watch had met its demise at his saliva. It was worth it.

You remembered when he spoke his first word.

You’d been swearing and cursing at a laptop, bouncing him gently on your knee as he chewed away at a colourful plastic chain. And yes, it was a very slobbery chain by the time he was done with it. You’d dumped it in a sink full of water and left it in the sun later when you put him down for a nap.   
You’d worn latex gloves the entire time too.

You’d slammed a hand down on the desk, forgetting Dirk was there for a moment.

“Come on! Don’t fucking die on me _ now _ of all damn times!”

“B’o?” 

You turned whiter than a sheet (Let’s be real, you were pretty damn pale) when you remembered he was there and shouting around a baby wasn’t always smart. Or ever.

It took you a few seconds.

“What?”

“B’o!” 

You’d taken the rest of the day off to parade around, filled with pride because he’d said his first word. You’d even recorded it.

You have that somewhere around here. Maybe you’ll dig it out one day, make a copy and leave it at her grave.

You shake your head at the memories. What purpose did they really serve now? The past was the past, set in stone and unchangeable. You weren’t a time traveller.

You needed to worry about your job, and surviving it.   
Everything else would fall in place, you’re sure of it.

You head to the kitchen, make Dirk breakfast, lunch and dinner. You wouldn’t be home today, but maybe you could do some cooking for him for once.

You leave each meal with a sticky note in the fridge and head to bed. You’ll sleep a little while, get up early and leave.

Your cat follows you to bed, anything after that is between you and your noisy, judgemental feline.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a bit shorter because I'm lazy and also I was busy writing a future chapter that's about seventy pages long by now.


	4. The Petition To Ban Polo Shirts Is Funded By The Illuminati

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dirk reveals a hatred of polo shirts and punches someone in the face, what else is there to say.

Only a few months after Roxy and I turned thirteen we ended up moving on from middle school to a high school. I'll admit. I was upset. We'd barely just settled into one new school and now we were being thrown into another one. I took solace in that some of our classmates were coming with us, the others tossed to other schools because they were closer or more affordable or whatever. 

The school uniform consisted of white polo shirts and blue jeans.   
As an avid advocate of the eradication of polo shirts for how damn ugly they look I was obviously displeased.

Roxy regularly said the joke was “If polo shirts are so bad that even Dirk likes them then maybe we should be burning them by the thousands.” Outwardly I was miffed.   
I was also miffed on the inside with a side of annoyed she was a little bit right.

Our first day of high school, Roxy came to my place to be dropped off.   
We hadn’t arranged for this to be so of course, I was rather surprised when I opened the door-- rubbing gunk out of my eyes and not the least bit prepared-- to find her standing there. Fiddling with the hem of her polo shirt, half of it tucked haphazardly into her jeans with a sheepish grin. She didn’t need to say anything, I kind of got the gist of the situation. 

Roxy’s mom had. Problems. It was pretty obvious.

Sometimes I could see her hands start to shake in the mornings I slept over at Roxy’s house, sometimes she sweats and there’s dark circles under her eyes. That’s only when she can be sighted out of her office, or her room. Or even in the house at all. More often than not I’d walked on over and not seen the woman the entire time I spent there.

But I suppose Roxy could say the same about me and my bro. It wasn’t like I could deny his early mornings and late nights, and all his Daves and Daves and Daves.

Roxy didn’t get called other people’s names. She knew her family tree pretty well. The Lalonde family was old money, the matriarchs careers more like hobbies than real methods of making money. Her aunt dedicated her life to physics and astronomy, even had her own mini observatory from pictures Roxy had shown me. She looked pretty similar to Roxy as well, like an older version, but with a more crooked nose and genuinity in her black smile.

She had a cousin called Rose, her hair short and part of it just shaved short depending on what year it was. She was about a year older than Roxy. She was into Lovecraft, and wore choker necklaces with pentagram pendants on them. She always,  _ always _ , had combat books on in her photos and half the time had a black tuxedo cat in her arms. 

Roxy said that Frigglish and Jaspers had come from the same litter, and might as well have of been twins. A friend of her mother’s sewed the tuxedos for the two cats. Paprika or something like that. Some dumb name that wasn’t a real name and yet had been unfortunate enough to be invented. 

Someone still in their scene or emo phase might’ve said ‘like me.’   
I had neither of those phases.   
It can’t be proven.

Nonetheless, the Lalonde family was quite interesting. The author, the scientist, the goth…

And Roxy. 

Roxy with those weird pink photoshop eyes and all her bounce-bounce-bounce-bouncing personality.   
Of course as we were getting older there was more… Bouncing.

I never  _ stared _ .

I’ve gotten off track.   
Roxy was standing in the doorway, white polo shirt shittily tucked in and uninvited on the first day of high school.

I hadn’t said anything yet, I was mostly reaching forward to fix her shirt before saying ‘Yeah there is always room in the car for you.’   
‘I won’t leave you to walk alone.’   
‘I’m sorry.’

Bro appeared behind me, toothbrush in mouth and tie just wrapped around his neck like a scarf. Before he left the house he’d do it properly, but for now that was it’s fate.

“Hey, rugrat, don’t have a ride to school?” He spoke around the toothbrush in his mouth, I envied him for having the forethought to maybe get up earlier to brush my teeth and do my hair.   
I’ll just run my hands through it with gel and call it a day. She’ll be ‘right.

“Nope! Mom’s outta town,” Drunk off her ass, “And completteeelllyyy forgot to get me some way of gettin’ to school today--” I untucked her shirt finally, and put my arm around her shoulder to pull her inside. I saw her wince from the corner of my eye when I touched her shoulder. 

Had she hurt her shoulder or something? Who could say yet.

“We’ll take you.” My tone left no room for argument. Sounding as sure as E.L. James did when she published her  _ Twilight _ fanfiction for all middle aged mothers and women to masturbate to when their little kids had been put to bed with the help of uncle Jack Dan.    
Which is to say pretty damn fucking sure but not nearly as nauseating.    
Or as pseudo sexy.

“‘Course we will, can’t leave a damsel in distress after all.” Though Bro’s voice was as mostly monotoned as ever, there was that hint of jest in it and coupled with the wink that made Roxy giggle-- She’d tell me later it was nerves-- I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at it. Which was a first. Probably. It felt like a first, like an Official(™) eye roll, courtesy of yours truly. Genuinely meant and completely dismissive of him. 

For the first time.

“C’mon.” I grabbed her elbow and pulled her away from the front door, Bro grumbled about kids never closing doors behind us as I pulled her up the stairs to my room. I didn’t want Bro joking around and winking at her.   
Specifically her. Someone my own age. Someone as important as Roxy.    
He had his own kid.   
Roxy was  _ my _ friend.

I shut the door behind us, and as always Roxy sat on the mattress pile of two while I did other stuff. Like pull out clothes I’d need and shove the school supplies Bro had ordered online into a bag I’d ordered.   
When I say ‘Bro ordered,’ I mean I used his card to buy it. The bag I’d paid for myself. He’d been too busy to take me anywhere to buy the stuff, so I did it anyway. With or without him I’d get by.

“She was on the floor when I woke up.”    
Roxy’s voice was soft. But not the kind of soft you’d find in classical music or in those indie artists on YouTube playing ukuleles who you can barely hear even with your volume up to one hundred.

It was the soft way glass fell to the floor in slow motion. Soft in the way alcohol drips onto a soft tile floor in the middle of the night because you don’t know how you’re supposed to relate to a mother who is like a ghost when she’s present. 

Roxy was a whole lot of things. But I hated it when something made her soft like that.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

Awkwardness twisted in my head and raveled around my tongue. 

“Well. Bro will take us whenever you need.” When he’s home and can be bothered, until he pulls out again and takes us to whatever city he’s filming in next. Until he decides he’s too hungover and asks us to walk. 

Until, until, until.

“Thanks, Dirk.” She was quiet for a long time, and I kept digging around for supplies. Mostly just wasting time honestly, I didn’t want to leave her alone. Not that I didn’t trust her, I just felt like it’d be rude.   
Or that it might be good to keep her company for a while.

We sort of stood around for a bit. Me, unsure what to do in the light of knowing her mother had screwed up a big day, and her feeling awkward on needing this help.

I moved on a bit, fussing over the dumb shirt we had to wear for school. Disgust colouring my features only the slightest bit allowed for a Strider.

“Do you think there’s a petition to stop production of polo shirts, or should I be making one?”

“Dirk, that is the dumbest thing anyone’s ever said. Of course there is. It’s just funded by the Illuminati is all.” Well that crushed those dreams.

It didn’t take her long to squint at the state of my desk, at the oil spills and all the screws lying around it.

“Did you stay up all night workin’ on somethin’  _ again _ ?” I froze. Maybe I had been working on something, mostly taking stuff apart. Mostly taking Bro’s turntables apart bit by bit when he wasn’t looking. “What were you--” 

I hear Bro and his dumb bird screeching at each other downstairs, I grabbed my towel and clothes and skedaddled out of the room while I had the chance and Roxy hadn’t said anything too loud about it. “Can’t talk, Lalonde, got to shower, see you in a bit.”

I heard her shout after me and slipped into the bathroom. 

I took my sweet time showering. Honestly I was a little tempted to lean against the wall, maybe doze off for a second or two, but I did have Roxy waiting.   
And Bro was banging on the door too.

I dried and dressed myself in the bathroom, slicking my hands through my hair. Maybe taking a bit more time than just getting gel and running my hands through it. It had to be styled in a specific way, it was just Strider code. There was a manual and everything, page sixty nine “Thou Shalt Not Deviate Thy Hair from Thy Normal Style: To Do So Is To Defy God.”   
Something like that.

We ended up being a couple of minutes late from when we were told to ideally arrive by. But that was fine.

There was a crowd of other students, all our age, just beginning in front of the school waiting for some kind of sign or signal to show them where to go or what to do. So Roxy and I waited just an inch or so out of the school bounds-- so that we weren’t in the midst of the crowd-- and waited just like everyone else until we got herded to the gym where they’d announce where to go, who the homegroup teacher was and all that usual high school jazz. 

When teachers did start herding us, like a mixture of sheep and cats honestly, I grabbed onto Roxy’s hand. Unwilling to let the rest of the student population separate me from the only familiar face in this entire town’s worth of new students. Her fingers squeezed mine and my stomach did a little flip. I licked my lips, nervous and unsure, before pulling her through the crowd as I pushed us ahead. 

There were older year level students milling about of course, some in buttoned up shirts and ties, a blazer present in about fifty percent of them, and others dressed like we were. I could see Roxy stare at those blazerless buttoned up shirts enviously, I figured she’d make the switch sooner or later as soon as she was in those final years. I’d be eager for it too honestly, uncomfortable in the cut of these fucking poloshirts. 

Honestly. Who thought it’d been a good idea to make polo shirts?

I’ll tell you who.

René Lacoste. An old tennis player who didn’t like the style of the old tennis wear, and had set to making a type of clothing to help diminish the inconveniences of it. He was also known as ‘The Crocodile’, and wore his designs at the 1926 U.S. Open championship. Ever since it’s been a horrifically ugly piece of clothing that people everywhere are prone to buying and wearing with only minimal shame if they’re not self aware.

Golf players also wear polo shirts. Which is another reason to distrust people who play  golf severely, aside from them being associated by proxy with Tiger Woods. Whose name only brings forth the image of several affairs and a tiger hiding in the woods. Neither all that pleasant. So you could understand my reasoning for disliking this useless wreck of wasted cloth. It’s a disgrace, and as Roxy would say.

If even I dislike it, then it  _ has _ to be awful.

Doesn’t mean I like her saying that.

The principal of the school gave their speech, reciting the school’s motto or whatever random phrase the founders (if not a past principal) had chucked in when deciding to set the school up. It was something dumb and short so I obviously didn’t pay attention to it and instead set to examining the teachers lined up behind the principal. Homegroup teachers obviously, some of the younger ones were all smiles while the elder ones cast a critical eye over the crowd. 

I wondered which one Roxy and I would get. 

It didn’t take too long for the thought that Roxy and I might not  _ have _ the same teacher to hit me. It made me nervous almost instantly, I glanced at her from the corner of my eye. She was paying just as much attention to the principal’s long speech as I was, which is to say not at all. I wondered if she’d thought of the possibility before I had. Probably not, her head was as up in the clouds as often as she was playing videos games. So almost always. Would she be alright without me, surrounded by a bunch of strangers.

Of course she would. It’s Roxy.

Would I be?

I gripped the padded back of my bag in the hand furthest from Roxy.

I didn’t want to be separated from her that early. I didn’t want her to gain friends who were better than I was and leave me in the dust. I’d experienced that kind of worry already when I met Jake, and knew well enough that I’d have to put some effort in to make friends of my own. I wasn’t looking forward to it, if it happened, to be sure.

“And behind you on the walls you’ll find your homegroup class roll calls, this’ll help you find your classmates--”

I suppose that was a better system than waiting for a teacher to call your name out. Less boring too. 

Roxy hauled me up as soon as we were permitted to stand and go scrambling to find our names, and I went with her reluctantly. As though if I just wasted enough time I could avoid finding out entirely. Sadly she is surprisingly strong and barely noticed any reluctance, we got there in record time.

We scanned the pieces of taped up paper, looking for our names. Fingers running down lists. I saw Roxy’s name first, a lump in my throat forming when I didn’t instantly see mine below it. My jaw clenched and I resigned myself to searching another piece of paper before Roxy tapped excitedly on the paper. 

“Dirk! Look! We’re in the same gla-” She stuck her tongue out, giving a smell ‘blegh’, before speaking again. “ _ Class _ !” 

Full disclosure, it was cute when she messed up sometimes. The way she’d stick her tongue out, sometimes crossing her eyes and getting that slightly frustrated creasing between her eyebrows. She was a cute person. I’d be happy to admit it. To myself.

My eyes fixated on where her finger was tapping, and sure enough further down the list was ‘Strider, Dirk.’ 

There was only one way to sum up my relief and excitement.

I nodded.    
“Sweet.”

I checked the name on the top of the list, scanning for where it’d say that our teacher would be waiting for us. Grabbing onto Roxy’s hand again to pull her out of the crown before the students pushing at our backs could crush us against their weight and trample us below their feet-- like the dead soldiers in a great battle. Forgotten and in the way.

I suppose starting our school days off with a metaphor about being dead soldiers wasn’t the best method, but it was definitely a method.

There was a small crowd of us eventually filed into a classroom, seating ourselves on tables based on who we knew and whether or not we could find a place to sit without being filled with social anxiety as we were surrounded by strangers.

Not even my words, lot of people joked about it later in the year.

Our table consisted of Roxy, a filipino girl with a short bob, some messy haired loud-ass boy, an antagonistic white girl with a pirate’s eyepatch just above her eyes and an empty seat inhabited by the ghost of Christmas past. Apparently we had a student that’d be joining us later in the month but couldn’t make it now. No biggie. It happens all the time. 

The filipino girl was called Jane, and apparently somehow her family owned a bakery or something like that. The loud kid with volume issues was indian and called Kartik, but the white chick called him Karkat sometimes. Roxy and I both stuck to Kartik, we’re not sure if he appreciated it or not. We didn’t have too many interactions with him beyond sometimes ending up on the same table anyway. He moved around a bit, blending in okay-ish with most of the little cliques that got formed. Everyone humored him, it worked against us all.

The white chick’s real name we’ll never know, as she interrupted the homegroup teacher with her nickname of ‘Vriska’ and thus we never got to hear it. Kind of wish we had. It was probably something dumb.

Like Sharon.

Apologies to all Sharons out there, but, c’mon girls. 

That was our group for the first few weeks before people filtered in and out. It was quite consistently Roxy, Jane and I. Which suited me fine, Jane was surprisingly good to get along with. 

Our homegroup teacher, well, there wasn’t much to comment on. She was one of those average teachers, you know? No one who was particularly bad or good, never did anything out of the ordinary. They were  just a teacher, and within a day of no longer taking their class you’d forget their face and name. Only smiling politely at them in hallways with the faintest hint of recognition but being unable to place, or unwilling to place, where it was coming from.

The real highlight of our homegroup sessions was the conversations. Not even just our own. There were times we’d either go quiet, or Roxy and Jane would chat, and I’d zone out and listen to the other conversations going on around the room. It’d prove interesting most of the time, figuring out what was going on in other people’s lives and what they were interested in. Like being a spy, except everyone else was super bad at keeping information to themselves so your job was super relaxed. Giving you more time to figure out who you wanted to sell this information to, and at what price. 

So yeah. A lot of the time it was pretty relaxed.

It took about two weeks, but, Jane eventually invited me over to her place to hangout. I agreed pretty easily, unlike how I had with Roxy those years ago. I suppose she’d warmed me up to the prospect of actually making real friends. 

I suspected that Jane’s situation would be like ours, an absent guardian and that was how she saw a kindred soul in Roxy and I. Because she saw bits of herself in us.

I was.    
Very wrong.

Arriving at Jane’s house had been like stepping into another world.   
No smell of alcohol or smoke, no fast fingers typing away at a laptop. No, instead there was the smell of  _ food _ , real food, being cooked in the kitchen with the general aura of warmth and kindness about the place.

It didn’t just feel like a house or an apartment. It felt lived in, rather than survived in. I felt a stab of envy, or about twenty three with one fatal wound near my aorta. Call me Julius Caesar, babe. 

Jane welcomed me at the door, letting me in rather than pulling me in like Roxy would and closing the door behind me. Her dad was a nice man with a friendly looking face and an excellent hat on top of his head. He smoked a pipe and ruffled Jane’s hair affectionately before leaving us to our own devices, to what I assumed was his compulsive baking habits after the tragic loss of some fine ass facial hair.

I needed some kind of flaw in him to keep myself from being actively bitter about Jane’s situation.   
Sorry, Jane, but it’s true.

We ended up hanging out a lot, actually. Jane’s interest in old detectives with fine mustache’s and her like of mysteries was something I enjoyed discussing, if not taking it to an absurd level for purely ironic purposes.

Not once did I invite her over to our house and all its emptiness and it’s lack of warmth and home cooked food. 

Not fucking once.

She’d catch on eventually, probably, but I’d be fucking damned if I was going to let anyone take a look at how I lived and turn up their nose or feel nothing but pity for me. Fuck that. Especially not a friend like Jane.

Our mystery student kept getting delayed by events, so in the second month of our high school year, he wasn’t there to witness Roxy and I get in proper trouble with our parents and the school for the first time.

You see, we’d all learn much later in our lives that Jane had a thing known as PCOS. Poly Cystic Ovary Syndrome. Which essentially means that there’s these little cysts forming on her ovaries, the symptoms of this include irregular periods, painful and heavy periods, irregular hair growth-- including the irregular growth of facial hair-- and putting weight off can get very, very hard. There’s no cure, the contraceptive pill can help with the symptoms for sure. The problem with the pill is that it makes you stack on more weight, and PCOS on its own makes it hard to have kids, the pill makes it even harder.

Jane was fat. There wasn’t any hiding it, she was attractive whether her weight was a factor or not. But not everyone agreed on that.

It was another day in our morning homegroup, I’d spaced out to listen to other conversations as Roxy caught up on homework and some weirdo from another table was chatting to Jane about whatever. Drugs probably. They were all the rage these days.

Then Jane came up as a topic. There was the same whale comment almost everyone might hear at that age. 

I didn’t give Jane a chance to do something herself. And honestly? I probably should have. It’d of given me a chance to have a healthy dose of fear from her earlier rather than much, much later.    
She could be terrifying. More terrifying than Roxy could be on a bad day. 

I stood up from the desk when I noticed Jane flinched, her lips twist downwards. Walking on over to the table I could feel some people staring at me, I would never move from that table unless forced to. I stared a group down who thought they would be allowed to sit at the table and leave no seats for the usual trio. It took fifteen minutes and Roxy only let it happen to humor me.

I heard Roxy stand up, try to call me back on over to the table, wondering where I was going.

I slammed my hand down on the desk of the perp. He was five feet, dark hair, light eyes, green as they come. Had never seen war in his life yet had metaphorical blood on his hands. A lamp light would’ve blinded the fool. The smoke from my imaginary cigar would make him cough in my later recollection of the events. The scene was in black and white. A shitty discount noir film.

“You want to repeat what you said?” 

His eyes narrowed at me, chin tilting up in defiance. The perp was stubborn, but not stubborn enough. As we say in those good old days of crime fighting in the force, what the public doesn’t know, won’t hurt them.

“Just said I don’t see what anyone would see in a tub of whale lard--”

Then I punched him. 

It was a good punch, nice and solid, thumb on the outside and maybe if Daniel had been a boxer he would’ve been more impressed rather than absolutely furious with me later.    
His narrow nose would also probably be crooked and that was a funny thought.

It was wild. Someone was screaming, Roxy was tugging at my arm and our homegroup teacher walked into the room just as it delved into chaos. The kid retaliated as soon as he could, aiming a blow for my face, so I knocked his hand away and punched  _ his _ face.

It was fucking sick.

Obviously I got kicked out of the classroom. I regret nothing about it though, that asshole never did apologise for what he said. He deserved to get punched.

I got sent to the office after the teacher had garnered I’d started the fight, I was chilling out on a table outside the principal’s office, which was within the ‘Office’, when Roxy and Jane got sent in after me. The kid that I’d punched absent, because apparently Roxy had kicked him in the balls not too long after I’d been sent off to Azkaban.

I remember her expression when she walked in.   
Posture self assured, with that little bit of meekness that came with the knowledge her mother was going to hand her ass to her when she heard. But she grinned all the same, showing off those bright white teeth with her slightly too large canines that jutted forward the slightest bit. She looked ridiculous in that polo shirt however so the moment was quickly ruined when my eyes glanced down from her face.

I thought she was holding something, I had to look down.

Jane walked next to her.   
And y’know, despite the fact she was upset we’d both gotten in trouble for trying to defend her, she looked happy. 

That’s when I decided I would from then on slug anyone who decided to insult her. Because that’s what a friend does.

We sat in our troublemaking row, Jane, Roxy, and me. Roxy’s head on my shoulder and my hand on her knee, Jane leaning on Roxy. We didn’t make a sound, not a single word uttered between us. It was a comfortable sort of silence that you get between people who’ve grown close and now share the same and very fatal fate. 

We knew that our parents were going to kill us when they found out. 

And despite all of Roxy’s want for her mother to talk to her, and to spend time with her, to show she cared.   
And despite all my need for Bro’s approval, his genuine affection and for him to be a presence in my life.

We didn’t care.

Far as we were concerned we had done the right thing. Justice had been served and it didn’t matter what they’d do or say. Their punishments wouldn’t matter because they hadn’t been the ones so see a sweet and confident girl flinch like that. 

They weren’t the ones who decided to do something about it.

Roxy’s mom came first. To anyone else, she looked as prim and proper as ever. But I could see the slightly mussed state of her hair, the dark under her eyes and those slightly uneven wings on her eyeliner (Which would normally be so straight you could probably level something with them). I knew she’d rushed to get here because she’d been hungover all day. I knew because I walked Roxy to school since Bro forgot to while he was holed up in his office and didn’t keep track of the time.

Some parents they were.

Roxy’s mother gripped tight onto Roxy’s forearm, walking her ‘calmly’ outside and to the car. Roxy would sneak out and sleep in my room that night, a bruise where her mother’s hand had been.

Bro was later.   
Much, much later.

Jane stayed with me while we waited, talking quietly about dumb stuff and ‘Are you okay’s that went with ‘Yeah but are you?’s. I leaned my elbow on her shoulder and read whatever dumb book had been left under the seats with her. It was something about babysitters and a club. Poetically named The Babysitters Club. I couldn’t think of anything that’d suit it more.

When Bro did come, he didn’t look happy.   
I suppose he never does really but he had that air about him that oozed displeasure and anger. 

For the first time.    
I was afraid. I kind of wished Brooke had been the one to pick me up from school. She’d be exasperated, unsure how to deal with someone else’s child, easy to manipulate and pretend to be sorry around. Bro wasn’t as easy to deal with. Brooke was more familiar and less important to me, I could pretend without feeling bad. Bro was… An enigma. 

He had a deathly silence about him when he collected me. Not the focused silence of a man working, or the hungover silence of the mornings. No, this was a kind of silence that even the air dared not vibrate around for fear of setting off a slowly ticking time bomb. 

I wondered if Roxy felt like this, when her Abrahamic God of a mother was on one of her benders.

I promptly decided that was a stupid thought.   
Her mother was way more terrifying.

The car ride was silent too. There was something anxiety inducing about being trapped in a small space with someone so angry. Being so close to something, someone, you feared would hurt, yell, maybe scream. With no room to get away, and knowing an escape attempt might make things worse. My hands shook, so I put them under my thighs. A Strider can’t show weakness like that. The press would pick up on it in a second, even in a town as far from them as this. 

He parked out the front of the house, keeping the doors locked. I wasn’t willing to try an escape attempt and scale the wall to my unlocked window, so I stayed quiet and sat still. Waiting for him to start.

“What the honest to  _ God _ fuck were you thinking?” He hit the steering wheel, not turning to look at me. Not yet.

“What the _ fuck _ was going through your  _ fucking _ brain that made you think punching fucking anyone was a good idea? I never expected this kind of bullshit behaviour from you, Dirk, but Jesus Christ, look where we are fucking now! Do you know how quickly this kind of shit can catch on? It doesn’t matter how far from a big city we are, this shit is going to follow you everywhere, Dirk, and if this ends up in some shitty magazine or paper you’ll be sitting in your room for a fucking  _ month _ , with only a mattress.”

I had to expect the reputation and magazine bit of the spiel. Image mattered to Bro. It had to, came with his job.

Me?   
I’m the one who had to deal with his lust for fame, no matter how exhausting it might be for fore him at any given moment.

“You’re going to go inside that fucking house and you’ll be packing your shit--” I heard ‘packing’, and instantly panicked. The school year had only started a few weeks ago, had this one incident ruined my chances of spending another year here out of Houston? 

Had my stupid choice to use violence to defend a friend been what separated me from my friends and Roxy for the rest of the year? Possibly for good?

I didn’t want that.

“I’m  _ not  _ doing that on anyone’s life.” 

I shouldn’t have spoken. Bro’s usually impassive face twisted, frowning and creasing in frustration and anger. The air of ‘where did I go wrong’, and ‘how dare this kid say that’ radiated off of him. 

“Don’t you talk to me like that, Dirk, I am your fucking father,” His voice almost faltered on ‘father’, the kind of way a man who never wanted to be one yet ended up raising a kid alone anyway would’ve faltered. “And you will do what you’re goddamn told.”

“Sorry,  _ Bro _ , but I’m not--” I emphasised ‘bro’ with all the spite a kid my age could muster. Only calling himself my father when it’s convenient for him, only addressing him as ‘dad’ when it’s convenient for him. Only coming home late at night when it’s convenient for  _ him _ .

Only acknowledging attempts to impress him when it’s convenient for  _ him _ .

I could see his hand raise, and felt my heart freak and skip a beat or two in panic inside the hollow of my chest. Face paling as I saw it start to descend. My shoulders tensing in an attempt to go small.

His fingers curled into his palm, nails digging at the well moisturised flesh as he brought the hand back to his side. An echo of an expression on his face, like he’d been just as scared of himself as I had been of him.

He unlocked the car doors, and I ran.

I scaled the wall, slipping in through the window like a thief in the night and went to Cal who was waiting for me on my bed. Bro had called out after me when I got out, but I was already halfway up the wall and didn’t feel like listening.

He’d never gotten close to hitting me before.

He’d never been around to get close to it like that.

There was a good two hours before a peep was heard from either of us. Someone decided to call our home phone, and I could hear Bro get up from the couch on the floor directly below me to answer it.    
I picked up a receiver to spy on the conversation. It was surprisingly easy to rewire a few things so that it wouldn’t interrupt a conversation between any other receivers. Downside was it couldn’t be used as a normal phone anymore.

I didn’t know why I was spying.   
Just wanting to hear my own father’s voice while he wasn’t angry maybe? I don’t know.

Cal was clutched to my chest like a lifeline while I listened. Though the call only really registered when I recognised the voice on the other end of the line.

Jane’s dad had called.   
But how’d he get the number.

“Ah, Dirk’s father, yes? I just called to talk about the events of today, my daughter told me everything that happened and I--”

“I get it, I get it. If the nose is broken I’ll pay for it and it won’t be happening again--”

“That isn’t what I’ve called to talk about, Mr. Strider, I was just calling to ask if you could tell Dirk that he should be quite proud for defending his friend. I assume the school didn’t say, or know, much about why the… Incident occurred. Your son was simply stalling a bit of schoolyard bullying, I believe, before it could become a habit for the year. It’s been a good few years since my Jane had a friend who’d stand up for her like that and it’s good to see she’s got a friend with a nice head on his shoulders.”

Bro didn’t say anything for a few seconds after that. Or maybe he did. I hung the receiver backup where it’d been stashed in my room and crawled under the covers of my bed. I didn’t need to hear too much more. 

I’d done the right thing, and that’d been validated.    
It felt. Pretty good actually. I could imagine Jane’s dad with his pipe in his other hand as he talked, fedora adorning his head and cake baking in the oven. Giving off an aura of what a dad should be like. Fatherly gaze with a fatherly voice as he fatherly held a phone to his ear. 

I wondered what it was like living in Jane’s house with a dad like that.

It was another hour before I heard another sign of life from Bro. A simple knock on the door before it was opened just wide enough to slide a plate into my room before being closed again. The smell of food, not take away or microwave meals but  _ food _ , was too tantalizing to ignore. So I got out of bed to investigate. Crouching beside the plate before picking it up to give it a critical eye.

It was a round, orange tart. Whipped cream on top, with strawberries. Big and the perfect balance between soft and firm.

I cautiously pinched a strawberry off of the top and bit into it.

Tasted how laughing with Roxy felt, and did not remind me in the least of Bro. Which meant it tasted pretty good.

I took the tart to my bed, and without any utensils to eat it with, just sort of picked it up to eat away. No doubt there’d be food around my mouth after, but I’d wipe it off and live.

Good things come in threes, you know. When it’s convenient for the world to decide for that to happen. 

So the next sign of life from anyone, was when Roxy climbed through my unlocked window.

She looked as bad as I’d felt, and probably just as terrified. Wordlessly climbing next to me on my bed. The smell of red wine and glass shards in her thick kinky hair, along with the bruise where her mother had grabbed her earlier, painted a not-so-pretty picture for me. I pushed the plate to the floor and wrapped my arms around her. We didn’t talk about what our parents had said and done. 

“Do y’think the teacher will be mad at us tomorrow?”

“Super mad, she’s going to turn into she-hulk and thoroughly wreck our asses. Raw anal? Chipotle induced diarrhea? Absolutely nothing compared to how she’ll rip us a new five or seven assholes for what happened today. It was good serving with you commander Lalonde, I’ll see you in Hell.”

“You’re such’a dick, Dirk.”

“You laughed.”

“Only because someone’s gotta take pity on you an’ your bullshittin’. You’d die if I didn’t, cast away in a lonely void of being super duper unfunny to everyone and having to acknowledge that even a knock knock joke is better than your semi ironical ramblings.”

“Knock knock.”

“Doors unlocked, come in.”

“Fuck you.”

“If you wanna.” 

The conversations only went further down hill from there. Whispered to each other and hiding away like alien refugees in the dark spaces under my covers.

We fell asleep like that. Her head in my neck and my face buried in her hair, breathing in bubblegum sweet perfume that only kids our age would buy and wear. 

She was warm, and soft. 

Even if I didn’t end up loving her. I think I could spend a lot of nights with her like that, just spending time together and being warm in each other’s arms. There never needed to be anything more, or anything less than that.

She wanted more than this then. I didn’t notice it just yet. 

There was the tickle of want in my stomach too. But it wasn’t fully formed, and it wasn’t going to be for some time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey i'm hoping everyone had a great month of holidays and is ready for another who knows how long wait for the next chapter of this   
> once again mightve been able to finish this earlier if i werent so lazy  
> but dirk punched someone so that probably makes up for it


	5. Good Roast, Watery Spaghetti

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's easy to slow cook a roast, you just put it in and leave it for the rest of the day.   
> But you don't slow cook a kid.

In Roman times, it was often believed that there were household gods, known as Vesta. Altars were made and sacrifices produced to keep the house running smoothly. These days we might call it the placebo effect. The belief that because something was done-- a pill taken, food burnt-- that good things would happen. If things went sour, you could pray to your god, offer something to them, and hope there’d be a light to find a way back to the good times again.

I knew a household god once.

Roxy’s hair had always been long, or big. Mostly long. Boundless tight curls adding volume to it, it was beautiful really. Dark and, without a doubt, had no better description than “Halo” when light shone from behind her. 

You see paintings of angels, with their golden hair and fair skin. Their halos pure light or gold behind their heads.   
I think the first time I realised Roxy might be an angel is when she cut her hair. Before it’d almost always been twisted into two thick braids that went down over her shoulders. There was always that stubborn bit of hair at her temple, curling and refusing to be smoothed down. She always tried to smooth it down. It was cute, a perfect spiral against her head. By far one of the more perfect things in our lives. 

After the fight at school, things got real cold between Bro and I. He was always distant, but now it felt like he was trying to distance himself even further. On purpose, on a conscious level rather than subconscious. I saw his assistant more and more. Trusted them more than I did him, not that it was an outstanding amount of trust. More out of familiarity and necessity than a true choice.

You sort of have to wonder, when it comes to situations like this. Why one mistake, not even a mistake, one choice sets you on a different path than the one you were travelling on. Whether you eventually learn to realise when you’re making those choices, even if you can’t stop yourself. It hurt at first, Bro willfully avoiding me for what I’d done. I felt like it was my fault, one last thing had driven him away and I was lucky that we hadn’t uprooted and returned to Texas once again. Like I should be grateful for a bit of stability. 

Is that fair.   
Is it fair that I prayed he wouldn’t punish me like that?

I suppose I had Jane’s father to thank, who I saw more after that incident. When Roxy was busy, or when, if you can imagine, I just didn’t feel like visiting a house just as devoid of parenting as my own. Jane’s house had a magic to it.

It felt like  _ people  _ lived there. 

It was clean sure, but there were still things on the floor and items not exactly in line or in their places. Like people had gone about their routine and forgotten to make their house look like an Ikea display home. There was cake baking in the oven and Jane’s posters of detectives with handsome moustaches on the walls of her room, her dad had a coat rack with hats on it and he always had that little bit of flour on the front of his pants from all the cooking he did. 

But despite all of that everything still felt like it was in place. It was homely.

I wasn’t the only one spending more and more time out of the empty houses that all these years later still had unpacked cardboard boxes. 

As it turns out, our little surprise student had turned out to be one Jake English. His grandmother having of taken some advice from a friend and moved off the island to give Jake some much needed socialising. I hadn’t learned this, and wouldn’t for a while until Roxy had a birthday party which consisted of Jane, Jake, me, and this other girl Roxy’s age whose name I never caught. I refused to believe Fefeta was a real name. It was just like that Paprika or Papaya name, completely made up.

Roxy visited Jake somedays, how I visited Jane. Yeah, there were days I’d knock on her door and she’d be out, but there were days of the reverse too. We got by, but we saw less of each other. 

We weren’t avoiding each other, not by a long shot. We visited, sometimes she crept in through my window and stayed the night without anyone else in the world knowing. The allure of normal households, loving households, was too strong to ignore. Roxy attracted by Jake’s grandma and her strong presence, her lack of silence and open affection. I was attracted to the same thing, finding it in Jane’s father instead.    
I suppose in a certain light, it might seem like we were looking for replacements. 

I learned how to bake from Jane’s father.

I’d gone to visit Jane but she’d been out, and would be for some time. But her father let me come in anyway. My ears burned when he did. I felt like he knew. As though he could tell from all the time I spent here after school and on weekends that I wanted to get out of my own home as often as possible, like I head a neon sign above my head displaying the issues I had with Bro. That I hadn’t seen him in the past four months. He didn’t mention it though. Either he was just that sort of man, or he didn’t know. Could’ve been both. 

Instead of having me wait in Jane’s room or something like that, he took me into the kitchen. Gave me a glass of orange juice and somewhere along the way I ended up helping him bake a cake. He taught me how to do the measuring by eye, rather than trusting the tools that I usually did when I ventured into cooking. 

It came out cracked, and I was sure it hadn’t baked in the middle. But he helped me frost it anyway, taught me how to make flowers with the right piping nozzle and put it into a container for me to take home with me. He wrote my name on it with a marker.

It wasn’t the most extravagant gift someone had ever given me, nor the most expensive or best.

But it was the first one that mattered to me.

After leaving the Crocker house I walked back to my street.   
Jane’s street is pretty far from ours, but it never stopped me from walking there. Then, once I got my license, never stopped me from driving there.

Maybe it was the distance that added another aspect of appeal. Further from sleek modern homes for rich director-actor-producers and for world famous authors. Closer to men who baked and raised happy daughters in modest homes.

Modesty.

That was something Roxy’s mother didn’t have.

Though the house that Bro had chosen for us was obviously for the wealthy, Roxy’s house was on a whole other level.

Roxy’s mother liked extravagance, drama. You could tell that much by her books, and the way Roxy talked about them and her. The way her eyes lit up when she reported on what particularly profound thing her mother had said in some interview or in her latest book. Despite her absence in any season aside from Summer, Roxy always held some form of reverence for her mother. Always came back from their summer holidays on the family island, or Egypt, or New York, or Sydney with trinkets or stories. Holding her mother up like a holy figure. Like she wanted to be just like her. 

Maybe she did.

I didn’t actually know. Not back then anyway.

The house Roxy lived in was straight out of a gothic novel, straight out of a beauty magazine, straight out of Kanye West’s collection of several thousand houses of white and black and crisp-ness. Every corner was perfect, every edge sharp. Walls lined with beautiful paintings and photographs of other places and of people. There were family portraits, designed to look like old victorian paintings. The Lalonde sisters and their daughters; their beautiful houses and their beautiful furniture. With their pedigree pets and every detail refined down to perfection. Always perfection. If there were another level after it the Lalondes would do anything to reach it.

That was their way. Never complain, never explain. Other various mottos that their grandma Lalonde had bestowed upon them.

She was dead by now, of course. The inheritance from her split between the two sisters, whatever was left by the time they died would be handed down to their own respective daughters. Lines upon lines of women inheriting money and an island to share. 

Old families with both old and new money.

Bro and I just had his recent rising up of being some big shot celebrity with a hand in everything. And I had to deal with the consequences of being some celebrity’s son. The expectation you will do something great, that by being associated with him my privacy was nothing. Less than nothing. It’d been proven to be like that on more than one occasion. The only thing Bro could say that would help, the only thing I could do to  _ not  _ ruin  _ his  _ reputation was to be impassive. Impenetrable. Stone. 

Where was I.   
Street.

Our street was for fancy rich people, it was evident. The cake container was getting a little awkward to hold right in my arms, and though it would’ve been more convenient to head right to my own house; I didn’t.

I diverted from the original plan to just head home and gorge myself on shitty cake and headed to Roxy’s house instead.

Though perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising, the seeking out of company-- of  _ her _ company. She was my best friend after all, someone who understood how I was raised in a sense. It was relieving, no explaining just immediate understanding.

I knocked on her door, unable to climb up to her window right away with something in my arms, and waited. One minute, two, three. I knocked again, a bit more hesitant. I’d prefer her mother not answer, would prefer not to be asked any questions about the contents of my new container and instead share it right away.

I was relieved to see that, once the door swung open, it wasn’t Roxy’s mother in all her grace. Just Roxy, her hair unbound from braids. It reminded me of halos and sunlight through leaves. Of the shivers up your spine and neck when someone you adore speaks softly to you. Her hair was.

Short. 

I blinked a couple of times behind the shades--   
_ the _ shades as though they’re something other than a fuckwad’s two dollar sunglasses--   
to look over the new style. 

It curled up against her jaw, no longer reaching down her back. Inches of hair gone.   
I didn’t mention it then, and I didn’t know the reason then either, but her hair seemed uneven somehow. Done wrong, or rushed, forced maybe. 

I also didn’t mention the redness to the sclera of her eyes, the weakness to her grin.   
The bruise on her wrist.

I lifted the container up, trying to draw attention to it and away from myself and my staring. It worked, her eyes going to the container. It bought me more time to look at her hair, and how much of it had been cut off.

“I made you cake,” I said, after a second or two, a slight catch in my throat. “Figured we could sit in your room and live off of it for a century or two. Taking it crumb by crumb until we’ve eventually adapted to living off of the smell alone,”  _ It looks like you need it, _ is what i didn’t say. But it’s true. She did look like she needed it.

Her eyes began to water. For a split second I was afraid I’d said something wrong, something hurtful, so I ran over my words again in my head. Her hand gripping onto my forearm and pulling me inside interrupted those thoughts. So did her grin, those teeth with the slightly too long canines on her bottom jaw and the two front teeth that tucked the ones immediately beside them behind them. The ever so slight yellow at the molars more towards the back of the mouth wasn’t unappealing or something to shy away from, it was a characteristic that was oddly charming. She’d mentioned that her mother had talked about braces, cosmetic surgeries, to straighten and whiten her teeth. To “fix” them. 

I never understood why they should be fixed. They were fine to me. Plus, some of the processes her mother mentioned, as I’d find out later from late night Google binges, would’ve only ended up hurting her mouth more than helping. As a shitty little kid, however, I didn’t know that yet. Still. It mattered to me.

She pulled me inside, locking the door behind us and dragged me up to her room. Inside the sounds of music blared loud. Her mother couldn’t have of been home then. That was fine by me. I’d rather avoid the Vesta that had taken up residence. The Vesta that brought with it ice, snow, and an air of soured mystery. No longer some famous author to be revered out of appreciation. Now it was reverence out of fear, out of wanting to glide through the waters without waking up a Kraken.

Roxy’s mother was a hungry god.

Roxy’s room was always something else.   
She had a window seat, and on the outside there was a lattice that plants could’ve grown up. Not once had I seen any grow along it however, it made climbing to her window easier. 

In her room, she had her own television, her gaming consoles and a small cupboards for the movies she acquired. She owned books, but hadn’t devoted a particular space to them. The first book in her mother’s most famous series was always seated on the bedside table.    
She also owned one of those indoor tents, fairy lights strung up inside of it and foam on the inside to make it nicer to sit inside of. The flap could be zipped up and she had stuck pictures she’d drawn of cats onto the fabric with sticky tape.

There were two other drawings of cats in her room, just two. Above the head of her bed on the wall. One done by Roxy’s mother, and the other I never knew until we were older and we slept together in that room for the last time. 

Her father drew that one.

She opened up the flap to the tent in her room, holding it open for me. So I crawled inside. She grabbed the stereo her music was playing on and turned it down low so we could hear each other when we spoke. She sat across from me, knees up to her chest. Looking happy despite the signs that she shouldn’t be. I opened up the cake container, placing the lid down and then the container down on top of it.

We ate cake by the fistful. It wasn’t a perfect cake, perhaps still a little uncooked on the inside and not risen as far as it should’ve. But no cake baked alongside a Crocker could be  _ entirely _ bad. Average, if not slightly above when it came to mouth feel and taste.

Roxy laughed, spilling crumbs over herself and I licked my thumb more than once to wipe a smear of icing off her face where her tongue didn’t reach while she plucked nail sized bits that had missed my mouth off of the front of my shirt. When we finished we licked the tips of our fingers and picked up the crumbs from the container. From there we merely laid next to each other, laughing over dumb jokes and recalled events. Over funny glitches in games she’d found and at my midnight antics when I couldn’t sleep.

We didn’t talk about my father, who didn’t want to be a father and spent all his time away from the reminder that he was.

We didn’t talk about her mother, who was as unpredictable as a natural disaster and as reliable as one too.

We didn’t talk about our own, separate, plans to leave our houses as soon as possible. To live somewhere, anywhere, other than here.

We didn’t talk about a lot of things. Because when we were together like this, those issues didn’t occur to us. When we sat in her tent, with cake in our stomachs, it was like there was no outside world. Like we didn’t have parents.

For Roxy, that sort of bliss didn’t last too long. 

After about an hour of us just talking, a car came down the street and pulled into the driveway next to her house. I’d never seen her move as faster as she did when she flew out of the tent and to the window to look at her driveway, to find nothing and no one there. I’d never seen her be as tense as that, before it turned to shaking shoulders and wrapped around herself.

I didn’t understand it then. Didn’t really recognise it then. I assumed it was something else, anything else. It took a few years for it to hit me.    
I’m ashamed of that.   
My father, he was absent but I was never afraid of him coming home. Roxy? She  _ was _ .

I was fifteen, would’ve been far more pimply than I was if not for my habit of stealing my father’s acne treatments he always ordered from his parents home country. I had weeks where I couldn’t sleep. I was always alone long enough to take apart my father’s things and put them back together without him knowing. I liked puppets, had one I carried around everywhere in the house, and was in love with technology. I was not equipped to  _ save  _ anyone, it should not have of been expected of me and never was from anyone but myself.

I never wanted to save anyone but Roxy.

I crawled out of the tent, brushing off crumbs Roxy had missed and walked over to her. I hugged her from behind, chin on her shoulder as I rocked her side to side to the tempo a slow song about something melancholy might use. 

She sagged against me. As though it had taken almost all of her energy to be afraid right then. I held her up. Hugged her close, not saying anything not yet. Eventually she did let herself cry. Not the kind of crying I did, where I tried my hardest to leave it at tears. Where I held back the pressure and aches, the noises and wailing never made it out of my throat. I forced myself to be a quiet crier. 

Roxy seemed more used to crying in empty houses, where she could be as loud or as violent throughout it as she wanted.

So she cried, and yelled, and called out like an animal in pain because she  _ was  _ in pain. She was in pain.

She was in pain.

I sat her down on her bed, keeping my hold on her. My shoulder was wet by the time she’d quietened down to sniffling and hiccups. It didn’t matter. It took another fifteen minutes for her to be calm completely, for her to gain some energy back. Just enough to seem embarrassed of her breakdown. 

The embarrassment didn’t last long, but I knew it had been inside her when she tried to turn away and how her hands worried at the hem of her shirt.

When she spoke up, her voice was raw. Still having that waver from the overload of emotion. I tried to ignore it. I hated that someone had affected her so much for her to be like this. I couldn’t ignore it.

“Do you like my hair?”

It was a simple question, spoken while her hand rubbed over the bruise of her opposing arm’s wrist. It didn’t take a genius to piece together the events of her day. 

Being a genius might’ve helped her in the long run. 

“I love it, Roxy.” 

I saw her in my room practically every night after that day for the next three months. Crawling inside later during the day, her mother withdrawing to her office early so Roxy had her dinner with me. I put new groceries on the list for Brooke to order or pick up from the local supermarket with Bro’s money. More ingredients rather than pre-ready meals or easy to make ones. I didn’t let her cook them either, well, she  _ watched  _ to make sure I didn’t give Roxy and myself food poisoning or burn the kitchen down. She didn’t eat what I made, went out instead, so I stopped making plates for her eventually. She wasn’t getting paid to eat it, so why would she?

Roxy and I set the table up proper. With all the fancy cutlery pulled out, champagne flutes filled with lemonade we mixed to either have slight orange or slight pink hues. We looked up the correct ways to use each fork, spoon, or knife and followed accordingly. Some days we pretended to be important nobles or royals, deciding the fates of the peasantry or discussing the latest dragon sightings over a good green curry. Other days we pretended we were re-enactors thousands of years from now displaying how people in the twenty first century lived. Sometimes, we just had dinner and it felt good to imagine all to ourselves, without voicing it, that this was how life was. Just the two of us.

I did that, at the least. I never told her. 

After those three months it stopped, her mother stopped going into her office so early and she had to have dinner at her own house. I kept cooking regardless, made portions big enough for two still. So I just cooked a little less.

I still pulled everything out, the flutes, the cutlery. Set the table nicely. Set it up for two but only put one plate out. Just in case Roxy came down the stairs because she climbed through the window, or if she knocked at the door. Sometimes she did.

Once, dad walked through the door instead. Two years after I’d started school, five months after Roxy stopped coming for dinner.

I’d made a roast, slow cooked it the whole day and left it with Brooke to watch over (she hadn’t) while I was at school. Then I’d oven roasted vegetables, made mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, and gravy. I bought cheap orange soda on the walk home from school with some coins I’d found on the school’s oval over a series of months. I poured it into the flutes and served myself the meal I’d made.

Fairly self-sufficient for a fifteen year old, I’d say. 

I was half way through, Cal seated across from me where the empty plate was. It felt nice to have something human  _ like  _ sitting there too. I didn’t talk to him, didn’t pretend he was alive, but it felt good. 

There’s a method of therapy some people employ. Re-parenting yourself, it can be done with a therapist or just yourself. Some people choose to purchase toys that a child might own, stuffed ones, to help with that. It helps apparently.   
Maybe that’s what Cal was.    
Helping me parent myself before I needed to re-parent myself in adulthood. 

When I heard the door unlock and open, I stopped with a fork of mashed potatoes halfway into my mouth. It fell back onto the plate. I sat up straighter, hand grabbing onto one of the knives as I craned my neck to see who was at the front door. Brooke was never home until an hour, on the dot, after six. I usually finished well before then. So who else had a key? Maybe someone stole her key, or she’s decided to bring someone here, or someone picked the lock and let themselves in.

Looking back on it later, on my thought process, it was shocking to me that my own father wasn’t an option I considered  _ likely _ .

When he stepped through into the kitchen, it felt like whiplash. Like for a moment I’d forgotten my own father’s face and seeing him again brought everything back. He wasn’t even drunk. His hair looked impeccable rather than slightly mussed, his expression neutral but aware. His clothing not the slightest but out of order. 

_ Striders pride themselves on keeping neutral _ , he told me once on a long drive to a new town where he’d film a new movie,  _ not showing emotion helps you give off the narrative you  _ **_want_ ** _ to give off. _

Yes.    
Striders do pride themselves on an impassive expression. 

He couldn’t have of been proud of himself when shock coloured his face in at the sight of his only publicly known child eating dinner alone with a puppet. Staring blankly back at him. A better brick wall than he was. 

“I didn’t know Brooke could cook,” he did a better job at keeping his voice even than he did his face. But there was something about what he said that bothered me. Did he intentionally leave me with someone who couldn’t cook? Had he expected pizza boxes and ready-made meals to be all that I ate while he was gone? The idea of that kickstarted a boxing match between my stomach and my intestines. 

“She can’t,” I retrieved the fallen potato from my plate, put it into my mouth. I wasn’t going to say anything else, I was going to just keep on and ignore him.   
But I still wanted him to be impressed with me. To look at what I’d done and think I was something special. A child to be proud of. “I… I made this.”

He looked surprised, then for less than a moment, guilty. There was something inside of me that swelled at his guilt. He missed out on this, missed out on  _ Jane’s _ father kickstarting my interest in eating something I made myself. Missed out on me teaching myself to make things, and picking up on it  _ quickly. _ Missed out on this, with a myriad of other things he missed out on. Another thing to add to the list that he doesn’t get to lay claim on. It felt  _ good _ . 

“You made this,” He nodded. As though he could pretend he expected this. He didn’t do it well. “There a plate for me?” The corner of his mouth lifted up, it was a joke evidently. For me, it was like he was asking for a place in the life I’d made by becoming that much more independent through cooking for myself. Asking if he deserved one. 

“There’s more in the fridge, on the second shelf.”

Thus I found myself having a family dinner. Cal downgraded to the seat next to mine and my father sat across from me. It was quiet for the first half. I watched him eat from behind my shades, subtle as I could possibly be. I wanted to see his reactions, waited for them nervously but he never gave me them.

“So, how’ve your friends been?” He eats the sweet potato before he does anything else. It’s his favourite, or so I’d learn later. When I did learn that fact I didn’t eat it for a whole year. Just because I associated it with  _ him _ .

That’s something I had to unlearn.   
To not associate the things I enjoyed with anyone else but the few I knew I could love forever and would love me in return and myself.   
I couldn’t keep relating enjoyable things to people who didn’t do right by themselves and hence didn’t do right by me.

I’d learn to move on.

“They’re good. Jane’s gone on a binge of old Sherlock novels recently. Roxy’s sending her the PDFs of them so she doesn’t have to go on this epic quest to find the forbidden detective shorts.” 

It was a simple answer. I said nothing of my concerns for Roxy. maybe I should’ve, could have gotten an adult perspective. But what sort of perspective could he give? He was barely a parent. At least, hardly one to  _ me. _ Who knows how he treated his  _ other  _ family. 

“That’s good, that’s good.” 

I didn’t ask him about work, and conversation died soon after. I didn’t need to know about how his work was going. I didn’t want to. 

During the quiet, I wondered if everyone had family dinners like this at some stage. Quiet, disinterested dinners with cold potatoes and roasted carrots. Lumpy gravy with distant fathers and nonexistent mothers. 

No.    
Probably not.

“Why are you here?” I couldn’t help but ask the question. Far as I knew his current project still had filming to do, among other things he had to oversee. He hadn’t taken the time to visit before. Why wouldn’t I question it? The stiffness that came into his posture gave me the hint that maybe I shouldn’t have, sending a mental caricature of myself running for the hills. 

Lizzie Macguire-esque perhaps. 

“I  _ live  _ here, Dirk,” His tone seemed to encourage a lack of argument. To stand down, don’t question it.   
Don’t bring to light the fact he  _ doesn’t _ live here. 

“The fuck you do,” I barely recognized the whisper from my mouth before he stood up from the table, loud and quick. His anger on display here, in this room with just the two of us and an ever-staring puppet. 

“What was that?”

He was angry, but almost nervous too. For that second, I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand that it was  _ him  _ who walked through the door, that he thought he could after ignoring me for God knows how long. Then he didn’t even want to admit to that. He didn’t want me to call him out on being a poor excuse for a father that tried to pass me off as his  _ brother _ . 

“I said, the  _ fuck you do _ .”

That night set a precedent for the nights he came home. Arguments, awkward conversations and the unwillingness to accept his pisspoor attempts at being what he promised he would be.

That night wasn’t the night I ripped out Dave from Cal’s cap and screamed at him for having a son he loved more than he did me.    
I was tempted to for sure.

I left the house more after that, made meals that were just enough for one person unless Roxy came over. Those days I pretended I always made enough meals for more than one person. I just wanted him to know he wasn’t welcome when he  _ did  _ come home. 

I crept into Roxy’s room that night, stealing across the border that was the road like a thief in the night. She didn’t ask, and I didn’t want to tell. We didn’t talk, just went to sleep and in the morning i went back to my room like nothing had happened.

Because _ nothing  _ had happened.

He was gone in the morning, and regret at at my kidneys that the last words for a while that I’d said to him were angry and hateful.    
But I suppose that was just how he deserved to remember me.

The next month Roxy got her driver’s permit, aced the tests and got to work on earning that license everyone craved. Her mother, for unknown intentions, got her a shiny new car to go along with it. A mercedes. Roxy, never one to seem ungrateful, only whispered to me in the early hours of the morning that she was going to sell it and buy a van instead one day. To have something that was her own, not her mother’s. 

It didn’t take her long for her to get that license. For me it took longer, with my father being so absent. But I got it eventually. For a good long while it was Roxy who chauffeured me around, Brooke becoming more irrelevant when I had better options. Roxy and I took late night drives, to the outskirts of the town. To look at sinkholes that had become small lakes. To park in forest and tell ghost stories in the car. We went down the street with our friends and when we were overloaded we ducked down and laughed to ourselves. 

Sometimes we slept in her car outside of the town and got in trouble for it. It was worth it. We were sixteen. It felt good to enjoy life now, rather than set up in hopes we would enjoy it later. 

It felt really good. None of the issues over the years had ended up with conclusions, and if they had they weren’t necessarily happy. But baking with Jane’s father, eating cake with Roxy, and going out driving were always going to be the memories I preferred to remember in those years.   
The rest of the events, weren't happy ones in the slightest.


	6. Midnight Coffee

“Jane?”

“Yes, Dirk?”

It’s a dark night. It’s always a dark night and he sleeps on an air mattress on Jane’s floor. The blankets he’s been given have moustaches on them and he jokes about his inability to grow his own.

“Do you get jealous?”

“Of who?”

“Roxy.”

**

Though the town was small, and perhaps that was it’s only description, that didn’t mean it had no highlights or places to go. It had shops, old as they were, places to grab food and a park that had a swing set on it. Roxy always tended to push too hard, as though she were trying to launch me off of it when it was at its highest point.

Roxy’s first job was as a barista at some coffee shop we frequented when winter hit and no one else had their heaters on like psychopaths but we didn’t want to just hang out at home and do nothing all day either.

Who wanted to stay in those old houses anyway. Far too much negative space to make up for, and far too many reminders of the incompetence our guardians found in us.  
She got the job after her sixteenth birthday, said she finally needed something to pay for all the games “[She] totally ripped right off the internet like a bandaid except you wouldn’t keep bandaids like [She does] games.”

Which really meant her mother had thrown a bottle the other night and cut her off for the next two years and in order for Roxy to get the games she needed in order to distract herself from her mother’s wine fueled rages when she was home.  
But, of course.  
I didn’t know that, and Roxy didn’t say it so her reason might as well be what she said it was. I knew there was more to it, there was a math to Roxy Lalonde. A type of code you had to understand to look beyond the outer shell she produced like an exoskeleton. 

The more she smiled and grinned, the less she meant it. 

Roxy applied three times for the same job, stubbornly refusing to accept a ‘no’ from them and I’ve no doubt that some nudging from her mother helped them to their final decision to take her on as an employee. She wasn’t half bad actually, she’d complain some days about customers and the managers, but she served efficiently with her famous smile. 

People loved her smile. The one she put on for people at work seemed as genuine as any other, full of light with beautiful slightly out of line teeth. Often framed with black lipstick she stubbornly kept on despite requests from managers, they stood out. Like pearls.

Though Jane, Jake, and I always ended up arriving to the cafe on most of Roxy’s shifts, mostly to distract her from her job without getting her in actual trouble. I always arrived to her graveyard shifts. I didn’t sleep well anyway, and if I didn’t sneak out of the house I’d just end up pulling something apart and putting it back together again. Finding myself asleep on a pile of parts and tools in the morning. So, Roxy’s graveyard shift it was. 

Roxy seemed happier with her own supply of cash (cash money, bank honey, bad bitch banking). The ability to not have to ask for new things and to be able to choose, without the approval or the snark from her mother seemed to have a good effect on her. She was certainly able to keep up with the latest video games these days. 

Even now, she seemed happy, leaving a late night coffee at a man’s table before waltzing on over to the booth I had claimed for me and my bag that night. There was a bounce to her hair and step, she stopped next to me. Expression taking on a look that read ‘Wow, here again?’ I brought a sheepish hand to the back of my head and nodded.

“Do you ever sleep these days, Dirk, or have you secretly cloned yourself so that you’re able to both go to school and show up ‘ere in the middle of the night? No-- wait. Secret twin, you’re not actually Dirk Strider, you’re his evil twin brother, uhh… Krid? Krid. Stickin’ with it,” She put her hand to the top of my head as she spoke, rubbing gently and definitely messing my hair up further. 

I had to admit, even after all these years the mention of some ‘secret brother’ sent enough knives to kill Caeser into my stomach. 

Some carbon copy of my father was out there somewhere, someone who looked so much like him that he got recognized by magazines for it. I still had that page under Cal’s cap. Never told anyone about it. 

“How’s your nose doin’?” I raised my hand to the bridge of my nose, barely touching the bandage that went from cheekbone to cheekbone across my face.

It hadn’t been too long ago really. Even small towns seemed to have some sort of violent presence when night came along.

Before the actual event happened, the part I could remember best was the permeating cold of that particular night. For a spring night, I hadn’t prepared for it well. My jacket a little too thin for the weather and a scarf might have helped, but it was a little late for that. I hadn’t planned on being outside for too long anyway. I was only out this late to see Roxy after her late night shift, we’d planned on hanging out at one of the local parks and mucking around while we had the time on the weekend. There was nothing like a late night date in the springtime.

(At the time it was rather hard to admit that  
It really had felt something closer to a date than a simple hangout  
Even though,  
Nothing had changed. A smaller more corroding version of myself that I shouldn’t be thinking that way, the ever present desire to possess the people I found an interest in was too evil to be laid down at her feet.  
I didn’t even want to admit to an interest.)

I’d been shivering outside the cafe, rather than going in that night. Thought it’d seem more cinematic when it came to a movie quality replay in my mind later that same night, thought it’d be a lot smoother than the night turned out to be. 

When she came out, it felt like soft snow. Like icing sugar and vanilla powder rather than little bits of ice. She hurried over to me, doing that sort of run with small steps, throwing on the thick coat she’d gotten when she and her mother had left for Scandinavia for vacation. It was expensive, and it looked it too. Fur lining and collar, the belt that could be done around the waist was definitely made of crocodiles. So I assumed anyway. Her mother bought it for her. The scarf she wore practically disappeared under all of that fluffy wool, a million bunnies had died for that. They did not die in vain.

“You didn’t have to wait!” She sounded a little bit guilty, looping her arm through mine.

“Of course I did, someone has to make sure you aren’t going to slip and hit the ice like someone put ice skates on a deer and told it to go compete in the Olympics.”

“I hate you.”

We talked the entire way home. Up to a point, at least. I don’t remember too much of it. 

At some stage someone had jumped us, pulled out a knife and demanded we give him everything we had on him. Like an idiot, I tried to take him on.   
I’m not sure whether it was adrenaline, sheer hubris, or knowing I’d rather have myself get hurt than Roxy, that made me do it. But I did.

That time I wasn’t much of a hero, he knocked me out, broke my nose. And Roxy had to deal with that alone.

She wasn’t a damsel in distress apparently. All of her trips around the world had let her meet interesting people, and apparently some of those people had given her the starting blocks to some kick ass self defense. Took the guy right down, called an ambulance and the police.

It’d been a bad week for my pride, but most of all I was ashamed.  
I’d made a stupid choice, and then failed to actually follow through.

I took the hand away from my nose, no need to fiddle with it.

“As broken as a majority of the American law system,” I pushed Roxy’s hand off of my head, smoothing my hair back into place, “You don’t need to worry about any secret twin here, Rox’, this is one hundred percent Dirk Strider premium beef, raised right here in the ol’ United States of ‘AAD’. ‘AAD’, of course, standing for absolutely ama--”

“You’re gonna turn this into a dick joke, I know you are so you can quit it now.”

“--zing dick. The ideal thing for anyone to suck on during a cold winter’s night.” She rolled her eyes, the exasperated groan only caused a grin to grow on my face. Her exasperation was what fueled me. 

“One of these days I am goin’ to get you banned from this place so that you can’t do this to me anymore,” She shoved my shoulder, pretending to mean it despite the fact I knew she didn’t and also couldn’t. “Then you’ll see, then you’ll all see.”

“Shift done yet?”

“Yeah, I called a taxi so we won’t have to be out in the cold so…” She shrugged her shoulders, we’d have to wait for the taxi. As we’d been instructed on doing since I’d gotten my nose broken-- like an asshole. 

We waited there for twenty minutes, huddling near the front door and peering out to spot our ride. Eventually, we figured the taxi wasn’t going to come. It was late, they probably forgot or just said ‘fuck it, never mind.’ 

“I think we’re gonna have t’walk,” Roxy started, nervously picking at the hem of her coat. It was spring, but it was awfully cold for spring. I could tell she didn’t exactly want to get either of us in the shit, but she sounded tired. Eager to get out of here.

“Yeah, come on. Nothing like teenage rebellion-- Ooh, walking home, scary.” 

She elbowed me in the ribs and opened the door to the night air. There were little pink petals on the ground, blown in from the breeze. I gestured for her to go through, and followed after. It was quiet that night, the occasional car passing by but that was just about it.   
The walk home was largely uneventful. Roxy saw a stray cat, I stopped her from getting rabies from it, she invited me on a family holiday, and it started to rain not too soon before we got home. 

We paused in the middle of our street. Our little fingers just barely wrapped around the other, as close as we seemed to get when were reached home and it was this late. 

“So…” She started, feet shuffling against the tarmac. 

“So.”

“I, uh…,” She paused, punctuated with some more feet shuffling, “Dirk… uh... Say good night to your ‘waifu’ for me, man.” She bumped my shoulder with her fist before running off. Climbing up her wall to get into her room. Her mother would hardly realise she got home. But that’s not unusual. 

I watched her get inside, still standing in the middle of the road until a car came up. I ducked towards my house when their headlights flashed, sheepishly going up to the door and letting myself in. Daniel would be off doing his Hollywood bullshit, and his assistant had long been relieved of babysitting duties at this point. So, I had the house to myself, and it honestly showed.   
There were towels on whatever space there was available for oiled parts and mechanical things. There were a few stains on things here and there. The sink was full of cold soapy water and plates. Should probably redo those. Or do them at all.

I headed up the stairs, kicking my shoes off at the bottom of them and hanging my jacket on a doorknob to Daniel’s room. It wasn’t like it was used for anything else anyway.  
I entered my room, chucking a few more of my things to the floor or on other surfaces. The ‘waifu’, as Roxy put it, she mentioned was a… Essentially a pillow with a very good cartoon character on it. That’s all that need be said. 

I laid down on the bed. Taking my phone from my jeans pocket. Daniel’s twitter seemed pretty active, Roxy’s mother was also pretty active on there a few hours ago. And so was Anne Hathaway, Roxy’s newest celebrity crush. 

I turned the phone off, plugged it in to charge. I didn’t have a lot of time left to sleep that night, and didn’t really feel like it either.  
After a few minutes I got up and out of my room. Searching through the cupboards in the hallway. Pulling out suitcases with tags that had my name on them. I took toiletry bags from the bathroom and filled them up before throwing clothes, socks, underwear into the suitcases. Packing as quickly as I could. Maybe it was just a distraction, or maybe it wasn’t. My room had become more chaotic in my frenzy to get packed up. Clothes scattered here and there, and three suitcases in the middle of the room, toiletries stacked on top.   
I thought about what Roxy and I had talked about on the way home.  
Then I went back to bed for the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i got lazy but theres a second chapter coming right after this so its gucci


	7. No one is a criminal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the original work of fanfic that started this whole thing, and honestly the one I've been most excited for. This is basically what I've written everything before this chapter around. It's been a while since I've gone to edit it so there may be a few mistakes here and there but it's gucci.  
> This chapter is also written with a different point of view because this is when we switch over from Dirk's point of view to Roxy's. There'll be Dirk chapters mixed in but largely it's time for Roxy to get her thoughts in now.

The beautiful Lalonde family.  
No one is a criminal.  
No one is an addict.  
No one is a failure. 

The Lalondes are graceful, tall, and angular. Old money. Their smiles are sly, chins square, and their bullets always strike true.  
It doesn’t matter if alcohol abuse drives them apart and makes them cry themselves to sleep in random rooms of their homes. Doesn’t matter if the trust fund money is running out and credit card bills are piling. It doesn’t matter if there is a bottle of antidepressants sitting on the bedside table in every. Single. Fucking. Room. 

It doesn’t matter if one of them is so very much in love, and to keep that kind of love so pure and different from the kind of corruption that seeps into and haunts the beautiful Lalonde family 

Desperate measures 

Must

Be taken. 

Perhaps that is all you need to know. 

Every year, ever since four generations back, the Lalonde family retreats to a private family-owned island off the coast of America. Here they can act as they please. The two branches of family have their own houses to stay in during the summer aside from the large house near the dock, a symbol of power for the family really. While Rose and her mother stay in one house, Roxy and her other stay in another one, and, depending on whether or not there are guests and how they choose to quarter themselves, the younger members of the family will stay in the house near the dock with their guests or to give their mothers privacy with their own. 

When it became more and more common for the younger Lalondes to have their own guests the solution was simply having a new house built. So that is where the younger Lalondes stayed from then on during the summer, them and their guests. 

Of course there is always some kind of conflict with a family with old money like that and the types of guests the daughters bring home with them. Though it is mostly conveyed through small micro aggressions, little phrases that could be interpreted a certain way.

In short, if you were not like the Lalondes you were not worth their daughters’ time. 

And your presence was simply humoured as a phase of short lived fancy. 

However, if you were particularly close to one of the Lalonde daughters, you might find yourself hidden away with them behind a bookcase that lead to the basement of their newly built summer house, and if you were very dear to that Lalonde she may, perhaps, just feel like she can trust you with that every single Lalonde house in existence is built with. 

However it seems no one has gotten that close to any Lalonde yet, so all you get is the basement. 

It is in the basement that Roxy Lalonde, and her long time best friend, Dirk Strider, are situated. Roxy half curled atop of her island guest while a movie played on the wall from her Ye Olden Times projector. There was a half-eaten and half-forgotten bowl of popcorn on the ground beside them. They’d made a nest out of pillows and thick fur or wool blankets. Some of Rose’s eldritch stuffed toys scattered in the pile and around the room. 

It was a peaceful moment, away from snide and snarky comments made by Elder Lalondes and protecting them from the harsh sun that had risen that day. 

She could feel it every so often, when the breeze blew through the open door that’d been hidden with a mechanism to disguise it as a mere bookcase. She’d requested that, Rose had backed her up. Every time that breeze came through she only snuggled and pressed closer to Dirk, much preferring his body heat to the sun.

Roxy Lalonde doesn’t cry very easily,  
Well,  
Depending on how you define ‘easily.’  
But she does cry during movies, that moment of self-sacrifice pulling and tugging her heart out of place and sending her body shaking as she tries to not cry.  
So that is exactly what starts up when that one particular scene pops up in the movie.

Dirk, on the other hand, isn’t thinking about that scene at all.

 

It’d been on their walk home – with both spring and the soft glow of secret midnight outings to locally-owned diners dying in the horizon – that Roxy had asked him to come with her. 

At the time, the small, sneeringly caustic part of him that whispered its paw-pad-soft paranoid vitriol about how what little detail Dirk was able to glean from her indignant insistence was suspicious, conspicuous, yet ultimately overruled, overcome, overthrown entirely by the fact that she’d trusted him enough to introduce him to these hidden-away portions of her life. 

It was another story if he’d earned it. 

Yet there he had been, dragged down with the weight of his bags, as if to match and combat summer for its luggage of first days of cold panic it’d brought with it. He clenched the handle of his suitcase close to his palms like the pulse of a dying man, then argued amiably with her about politics in the Gundam universe all the way to the ferry. 

They’d lost time like alien abductees in the last few weeks, in dark, yet softer places like this one. Places where there were no mansion sprawls full of empty rooms like half-healed wounds, dotted with downturned picture frames. Places which lacked the sting of preserved bedrooms and tight-faced pleasantries masking pointed, elaborate intents that her extended family had condescended to share with him. 

Them. 

Her. Her and her and her and her for an eternity of summers and hells before this one. 

Alighieri had claimed there were nine circles of Inferno, but what would he say to Roxy Lalonde’s now-eighteen? 

Luckily, all that had been easier to forget in the haze of movies that’d crested and fallen on the slightly time-worn projector in front of them. With her increasingly familiar weight against his, with the heavy feeling of evening in his limbs and a breeze blowing back her hair like a recurring breath, there were no silences he felt guilty not filling, nor suffocating spaces he felt stretched to fit. The room felt as if in repose, and Dirk found himself glazed over with the drowsy feeling of it. 

“Superman.” 

Until the first tears. 

It’s with a subdued, frantic energy that he shifts, the opaque of his sunglasses concealing his eyes skirting back-and-forth from the movie superimposed on dulled sheetrock to Roxy. 

He guesses he should’ve expected this, he thinks fondly, trying on a small smirk. It’s typical of her, and after near eight or so years of knowing her he probably should’ve prepared for it. He’d suggested this movie after all. Nevertheless, he tries for a joke (the safest go-to territory in the wake of Feelings he can come up with) while slowly, almost reverently rubbing circles into the small of her back. 

“… Welp. Had to take down the Ruski’s some way or another, Rox. Unfortunate and morbid, but definitely one of the more historically accurate scenes in recent fuckin’ cinematography… You wanna pause it?”

She hiccups. Starts wiping at her face and eyes with her wrists, if she’d been aiming to leave her makeup undisturbed she’d failed. It’d smudged and ran like Usain Bolt when he’d finally broken the world record. Dirk wouldn’t let her know,  
there was nothing to really fix.

But she had promised herself she wouldn’t cry.  
How many times did she have to cry at scenes like this to become numb to them? Apparently she hadn’t hit that number yet.

She keeps hiccupping as Dirk rubs her back, thankfully only crying from a movie and not from the holiday here itself. The concern is touching, of course, but an alien thing to experience on this island. 

Eighteen circles of hell.  
Eighteen summers of hell.

She’d done a brilliant thing to bring him here,  
she’d done a terrible thing to bring him here.

She had known her aunt and mother would have of hated him, would have barely hid it behind their wordplay and tight lipped smiles. She’d known it would have been obvious to Dirk. But it was how her summers usually went, isolated from everyone but her family and occasional hired help. Should have made it clear why she was always eager for the summer to end. Even if her time at their school hadn’t always been much better. 

Why was she thinking of that now when that's going to make her cry more? 

She shakes her head to clear her thoughts, presses the heels of her hands to her eyes before attempting her Classic Lalonde Grin™ like she would any and every other day.

But,  
He’s seen her summers now. So she lets it fall as she leans against him.

“It’s okay, I’m just being a cry baby, y’know, nothin’ unusual there. You know how I have wit’ shit like that, always gotta sob a waterfall when it comes to the sacrifice.” 

Summer eighteen, the summer of having someone with her who isn't a beautiful 

Fucking 

Lalonde

**

It’d been cogs and gears he’d been able to fit into; his teeth aligning in his personalized slot in a machine of regroup and retreat from the more overwhelming confrontations she’d obviously had when leaving him to his own devices at their submerged sanctuary. She’d denied it was “anything biggie” at his furrowed eyebrows, but it was blatant in the way her hopeful optimism and waterfall energy had tumbled out of her voice as she’d bounced around, recommending things they could do now that “boringsquad syndicate inc. ain’t kickin down [her] mad flow”, for all the world looking more like she was trying to find something that just wasn’t… here. He could’ve sympathized and said he’d known how it was, how he felt brittle, a sudden adrenaline-heavy rush of combative terseness against the shadows of wide hats and craned, food-critic angled necks all stark against floral, monotone wallpapers of black white black white black white gray. 

But it’d be patronizing to say he knew dat feel, bro, and he’d gaped wordless and empty like a mouth with no tongue until she grabbed a remote and he’d grabbed some blankets at which she’d grabbed the brightest smile she could manage. 

At which he grabbed his own. 

(Somebody give the man a medal. A sticker. A participation ribbon with some asshole color like puce, or chartreuse.)

Maybe he was just overthinking this and she was just hella sad for normal movie-going reasons his sorry ass shouldn’t be psychoanalyzing her for. 

Let’s get back to the crux of the matter. 

Dirk breaks gently from his mental Disneyland teapot centrifuge, his wire-strung muscles managing to finally relax from their red, screaming alert at Roxy’s more intimate position. At this angle, with the bright of the screen reflected from trailing wisps of hair behind her ears, he could trace the curve of it down the hollow of her neck if he just ghosted his hand out a little further. 

Doesn’t. 

Opts instead for adjusting his shades higher on his nose with his free hand, curving his torso and feathertouch-lightly pulling her in with his hand on her shoulder to more easily allow her to settle. 

He thought he’d grown used to the close contact they’d initiated in these warm, full hideaway moments, collected them in his head like victories thrown into his ears and told himself that this was helping, right? This was good and cathartic to her in a way even his affection-starved ass could give. 

In ways that a friend could be there to at least be a reprieve in the brunt of more burdensome burdens. 

More than a friend? 

Best friend? 

…. BFF? 

………….. Partner in crime? 

Was he really doing this NOW? Jesus fuck. 

She's concerned for a moment in the seconds he doesn't respond, so high-strung here that silence from him couldn't be a massive, flashing, neon sign saying 'I want to go home and leave you to your summers forever!' But he never does, doesn't know if he thinks it either, hell, sometimes she barely has a clue what he's thinking.

He remembers he still hasn’t responded, lets loose a small, (hopefully) casual sigh. 

“Yeah, well. If it helps, I would’ve broken laws of conservation of mass with my weepfluids if I didn’t have you here to be the sadtimez lightning-rod. I’m tellin’ you. Rue: fuckin’ bananas. Hope y’all aren’t keeping indigenous monkeys on this island,” 

A pause. He worries the tag of one of the blankets in his hand like a talisman you’d blow on for luck. 

“Besides. I don’t think babies get that sort of nuance when they’re morphing into screaming wail-caves. So, gotta say, you're not really living up to the title here.”

As he speaks she wonders what he thinks of her now that he has seen what her family, what this island, is like. Whether he thinks she deserves pity or touches that wouldn't even break a single strand of a spider's web, or light like breath that couldn't disturb a single hair. Maybe that was what his willingness to be so close and let her have these moments—

She needs to stop this paranoia, Dirk wouldn't let pity colour his actions and thoughts like that. 

Right? 

Despite herself she swallows and forces herself to pay attention to what he's saying. 

“I could always start sobbing right now, you know, talkin’ ‘bout how no one loves me ‘n’ that I’m so alone. All that pity party throwin’ bee ess that just ain’t me,”  
Isn’t her because she doesn’t want it to be. Isn’t her because she doesn’t want anyone else but her ceiling at night to know how true it is. 

She needs to stop thinking like that, or she'll start stealing into the Lalonde family mansion for alcohol again. 

She wants to be good while Dirk's here. 

She wants to be better than her mother and aunt while Dirk's here. 

Doesn't want to be like them. 

“I’m sure that the monkeys will be able to control themselves, Dirk, even with your crazy ass bananas metaphors echoing throughout this place an summonin’ ‘em here to do some straight up Jungle Book shit.” 

She takes that moment to change the movie, something happier, less tear inducing, pulling herself away from him and fiddling around with the projector. One finger ghosting over her name engraved onto one part of it. 

'Roxy Lalonde' in gold paint. 

Mother had wanted it to be real platinum, but she bought it with her own money instead so that the older woman didn't get a say. 

Roxy bought a lot of her things with her own money for that reason. 

“You have a movie you wanna watch, Dirk? We’ve got a few more hours ‘til mother’ll want us for dinner.”

“Does… that mean you have everything over there? Because I was half-hoping I’d find some stockpile of embarrassing childhood home-videos ripe for the reviewing, but regretfully understand if that’s not exactly at the top of your Netflix list,” he replies, dry as bone, yet still amused. “But nah, surprise me.” 

It wasn’t shocking to him that a clan of spinsters would have a borderline encyclopaedic collection of filmography, though less so was the fact that Roxy seemed to innately know not to recommend one of his father’s movies. 

 

His father. Star producer, actor, script-jockey, and one-man mariachi band. 

 

You name it, he’s done it.  
Then re-rendered it in a higher definition. (Or, lower definition, as per his most well-known series)  
Often, he doesn’t know what combination of it was Hollywood and Broadway’s way-broad spectrum of ersatz gigs bringing with them a groove for him to etch his every mark into, and what part of it was his own desire to do the etching. To etch and etch until he was a man rendered into marble so painstakingly, so lovingly, that for all the blood and sweat and bitumen gathered along a career carved by never-motionless hands, 

 

He was 

 

Pristine 

 

Untouchable 

 

Dirk’s seen more of him on YouTube trailers than he has this year. 

 

Most of the forefront media hounds had passed over at this point, luckily enough. Not long enough to kill the memory of the raunchier tabloids, or shouting million-legged paparazzi crowds holding the power of shaping and selling the newest incarnation of the glorious Strider life across supermarkets and newsstands slung around their neck like the weight of Atlas. 

 

In the distant-yet-recent years of outgrowing every article of clothing he’d ever owned, of red-carpet meetings wrought with cloying remarks; with sickeningly familiar expressions of equal parts awe and adoration paired with flickers of disappointment, of confusion, of forced laughter at his terse, unwilling proxy-celebrity answers, of refused affidavits to interviews to documentaries, of years of birthday texts of run on sentences going on and on and on and 

 

And 

 

It’s only now, in the dim of him and Roxy quoting their favourite movie lines that his body feels 

 

Exactly the right size. 

 

He almost didn’t recognize the pinprick glimmer of hypocritical disappointment deep in him when she got up. That blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glint where her slow-fading warmth still nested in their makeshift nest instead of her was infinitely colder. 

 

… But, hey, it was somewhat chilly in here, so that was an easy enough problem to color code. (Attribute it to any number of inkling ballpark theories being currently tossed around in his headspace like a mailbox spilling its contents via tornado. Brainstorming, indeed.) 

 

But Dirk curls away from the thoughts like paper over an open flame, refocuses on the present. Swallows the quake in his throat leaping up from his stomach. 

 

“And you could. Like. Talk about all those things you said. But, I’d probably have to peer review that theorem to death,” he replies, his voice as nonchalant as he can make it. 

 

“Academia just can’t be happy with those blatantly wrong conclusions in the face of, evidence like. Me.  
… around, so.”

He trails off. Attempts unsuccessfully to clear his throat of its sudden open rawness. So it’s easier to stop, instantly retrea – settling coolly into the productive and ever-important task of sweeping popcorn crumbs out from the Gordian knot tangle of blankets back into the bowl whence they came.

 

She swallowed at the mention of childhood home videos, she remembered when she had watched those herself during summer twelve. It was either her mother or aunt filming, sometimes Rose and Roxy themselves, lots of drinking during it, some fighting between their respective parents. That was only a percentage though, the rest was normal stuff, drunken filming still, but normal. Roxy playing with the doors of a cupboard, opening and slamming them again, Roxy and Rose 'dancing' with Roxy's mother. 

Roxy had not enjoyed the experience after the first scene of fighting between her parents, but with a bottle of vodka in her lap she powered through the entirety of it. 

 

They hadn't found her until the next afternoon when she had finished watching the videos. 

 

“’Fraid you’re outta luck with home vids, Dirk, family’s terrible at keepin’ record of that kinda stuff. Which totally sucks bee tee dubs.”

 

Roxy had watched Dirk's father's movies once or twice, maybe three times (she liked the recent ones best for their humour) and she did have to admit that the two did look alike so there was no denying the relation. 

 

But she also knew that Dirk had this almost micro aggression about him whenever he was brought up, she also knew that if she went to the Strider home at any day of the week he wouldn't be there. 

 

She knew because, well, her mother and aunt kept track of certain rising celebrities, he happened to be one of them.

 

And he always had some project, some movie, some something to do. 

 

Some days she wished that her mother was like that, always something to do, rarely home, but then she felt bad that she saw her mother at all when Dirk just... didn't. 

 

She tried not to mention those movies, nor keep them in the basement. 

 

She glances at Dirk, the way the light of the projector illuminates him, how he moves as he sweeps bits of the popcorn they'd shared into the bowl it had came from. 

 

Her heart skipped at what he’d said after mentioning those childhood home videos. She’d had to turn her head away for a second, biting her lip before looking back at him for a second.

 

For a second she has the temptation to say he looks beautiful-- No, not beautiful, she won't compare him to a Lalonde, to her mother. 

 

Radiant. 

 

Stunning. 

 

Mesmerizing. 

 

She popped another movie into the projector, After the Dark, a movie about a group of philosophy students imagining themselves going through various post nuclear apocalypse situations and trying to survive in bunkers. 

 

She figured that Dirk might like it, or it might at least prompt him to think about whether he and a set group of people would survive in a similar situation. 

 

She didn't presume he'd include her in that group he'd think of. 

 

For some reason. 

 

Once she has the movie beginning to start up she goes back to Dirk, arms soon around his waist like vines growing around a tree. 

 

It is in that moment that she remembers those vines are killing those trees, endangering them through strangulation and taking their nutrients, using them to grow and offer nothing in return. 

 

“I dunno if I said it, but, I’m really glad you’re here, Dirk. This is probs’ the best summer I’ve had, ever, ever ever.” She doesn’t want this particular summer to end. Having all this where it’s just them, most of the time in these rooms. Their rounded corner moments, these padded and protected hours. The baby proofed seconds where she doesn’t have to spend her time alone or have the potential for the elder Lalondes to crash on in with conversation that can make her skin crawl or leaves her weeping during the night. 

 

She could say that she loved these moments with him. 

 

She could shorten that sentence too. 

 

She wouldn't dare. 

 

So instead she takes the flesh and bone vines that she calls arms away from his torso and brings them back into the position they had been in before she'd gotten up to change the movie.

 

Her arms sink from him like wax melting from a candle, but he’s not sure whether the phantom itch of want in the action was her own, or what he’s projecting onto her as vividly as the new movie unfolding in front of them. 

 

It’s not the first time he wonders if she feels like a burden for all this, despite all she’s given him here. Sure, he wasn’t going to lie to himself, it wasn’t ALL the pretty, idyllic picture she’d painted it as. 

 

(Which he couldn’t fault her for. The ghost of his own blur of summers spent oil-covered and sleep-deprived in the empty sprawl of a floor-spanning apartment suite as a slave to any task he could complete in the isolation of his dead-morning-hour tinkering was a sunspot he was still trying to rub out of his eyes. Who would want to expose that sad, strange part of their life? The part where eight minutes turns into eight years turns into your whole life turns into another goddamn movie. 

 

He exits his room for the first shower he’s had in a week and the irony doesn’t hit him for a very long time. ) 

 

So it wasn’t idyllic. He’s definitely not looking forward to dinner, for one. The familiar stares wracked with the same feigned diffidence a tabloid interviewer might’ve approached him with give a twist to his stomach like it’s filling with helium. It'd knotted and knotted that first day like the tie that he actually had to tie, when he'd been unable to mirror the same sickly sweet smile back at her mother, and she'd fired a knowing one at Roxy that he hadn't missed. A knowing smile that had her bleed red over pink, over purple, over orange. Staining the lace table cloth with blood that oozed out of pores and orifices. That forced vomit up through her mouth and nose, over the cooked to perfection peking duck and other dishes. It spilt over the floor, flooding the house and right now Dirk could only watch.  
It was metaphorical blood and vomit of course.  
But he could see the stains for days afterwards.

 

How many of her covert, aside confrontations had been about him? 

 

It’s redundant to say at this point, that, no, it definitely was not idyllic. 

 

But, sometimes, it could be pretty damn close.  
A particularly vivid movie plays behind his eyes. 

 

The bark of seagulls, both of them overlooking the spread of brine over beach with the low, careening rumble of storms in the background, continents away. 

 

He finds a mollusc fossil as they skip stones under an ancient, thinning elm tree, every tumbling leaf spiralling down faster than they can catch. So they take turns naming the mollusc the stupidest things they can think of. 

 

(“Dirk Strider!! Lmao”)  
(“...You asshole.”) 

 

He argues he won, for appearance’s sake. 

 

She listens to a seashell, gets pinched by a crab for it, gently manages to persuade it peacefully back to the ground for all her bitten-back swears.  
He blinks at the dark highlights in her windswept curls and thinks of sand that only oceans touch. 

 

He is so happy he’s almost afraid of it. 

 

Suddenly, it’s very very important that he conveys this to her. 

 

“Hey, ditto,” he says, instantly. His tone is serious and meaningful and does not betray the slightest temptation to breaking into the rest of the Pokérap afterward.  
(Where the ever-loving fuck was that medal.)

 

“ ’Cept I’m also glad you’re here. Obviously. Because even though most of your relatives here are petty assclowns. And are probably breaking Geneva Conventions as we speak…” he muses, thoughtfully, in a momentary pause to his already half-joking sincerity.

 

He laughs, shakes the joke aside with a hand.  
Regroups, tilts his head so she knows the focus of his gaze is on her, steels his jaw before he talks again, quietly this time, as if she won’t like what he’s saying. 

 

“… anyway, besides probably retaining some of their more godawful interior decorating ‘tips’ they’ve given me for my future nightmares, it’s… kinda more than worth it for the diamond in the rough, y’know?”

 

“So... thanks. For bringing me.”

 

She thought it might squash that sick feeling down, make her seem like it doesn’t make her lose her appetite.  
Eat because you need to, not because you want to. 

 

She curled into Dirk as he spoke, face pressing against the bare skin of his neck for a moment, eyes closed as she listened to him. Face contorting into a grin, as it always did when she saw his orange text or when they spoke back home. 

 

Home. 

 

For once she didn’t miss it during the summer, not as badly anyway, while she did sometimes wake up wishing she could watch and banter with Jane while she baked over Skype or help her when she was actually there, or talk with Jake about whatever shitty movie he was trying to get her to watch so that they could talk about it. 

 

At the least she didn’t have to miss the shit talking between her and Dirk, didn’t have to miss the occasional (more than occasional) attempt to hack into one of his latest projects, didn’t have to miss texting him while her head swam and cooled against the tile of the bathroom floor even though the brightness of the screen hurt her head she wouldn’t have of traded it for the world. 

 

Even when she thought he was growing tired of it, of him being the first one to get a message from her when she did that. 

 

She thought herself selfish because of it, but didn’t feel guilty.  
Too guilty anyway. 

 

At the last part of his lil half ramble half soliloquy she took her head away to look at him. Warmth spreading in her chest just from hearing and seeing him talk like this, she didn’t care what he said about her family (he could say he hated them and she’d only nod to agree) but she did care what he thought of her, after all why wouldn’t she? He’s her friend, best friend, favourite friend (she’d never say that out loud) the one who understands, after all, Janey has her dad and he’s a proper dad, Jake has his grandma and Jade, and if he’s bitter about anything he’s too… British or chipper to show it. 

 

Roxy’s bitter about a lot of things, her impulse micro rants that she wants to delete every time she’s reread what she typed and sent to her friends show it. 

 

No one seemed to say much about them. 

 

“Oh yeah, Dirk, just think me for bringin’ you to the Lalonde version of Hell incarnate itself, we even have hidden caves and secret beaches to attract the unsuspecting visitor to their salty, salty doom.” She laughs softly, leaning her head on his chest for a moment. She’s honest about her relatives these days. Honest about her mother, and those pearly teeth fit for biting the hearts out of the chests of gods. She’s honest about her aunt, who is just as bad to her cousin with a subtle Roxy’s mother cannot master. Bruises last for days to months, leading to treatment for the discolouration on her brain from every word and swinging hand.

 

(She settles back into him and he shifts accordingly as per their unspoken default. But, fuck, he wasn’t vaccinated to the contagion of her smile, especially not when she was so close. Close enough for him to feel her quicksilver shorthand pinching at his chest as she talks, this deep, building weight in his ribcage that tells him he wants nothing more than to let go, to lean further into her embrace and give in, to give his air to hers or even just fucking reciprocate like any other human being would. 

 

But if he starts now, he’s pretty sure his needy, effusive brand of chokehold affection will dig into them faster than snakebite; poisonous and caustic and volatile. He opts instead to dramatically push his shades up into the most anime glare they can manage, gives her a cool-headed thumbs up.)

 

She continues, “I’m sorry that they’re like this, Dirk,” She didn’t mean to, she thought they’d behave with someone else here. “But I’m glad you’ve found one bonus to it all. Ripe for the psychoanalysis that I can just tell is cookin’ up in your noggin’ there. Good entertainment for you.” 

 

She pauses again.  
He wouldn’t like to have dinner back at the main house again. Watching him struggle to get a Windsor knot right could be a nightmare. 

 

“We could skip dinner with mom, there’s food in this house and the kitchen is, surprisingly, functional. We’ll make the shittiest dish possible and name it Dirk Strider.”

 

“Hey, if it’s cool with you then that sounds pretty good. Barring a few irredeemably wrong things you just said. First off, said beaches and caves were easysauce to deal with. I mean, you’re the one who had way more trouble than I did with its more chitinous denizens,” he reminds her, with a ghost of a smirk. Captain Smirk Strider, on deck. 

 

“Second, I’m a hella fine dish, thank you very much, and am going to fucking wow you with my endless spill of domestic succor. Providing we have the right materials up in there, of course. I’ll even let you watch, if you ask nicely enough,” he finishes, all roguish nonchalance and feigned superiority. 

 

(She can't help but give a joking scoff at his words, sure, as if he wouldn't let her watch, if he was that much of a good cook he would probably show it off. 

 

And she would love it.)

 

He pauses before slowly, thoughtfully unloading his last point on her, careful to wait for more extraneous points of exposition in the movie. 

 

“And. You don’t gotta apologize. Not your fault they got your example to go by but are still … y’know,” he waves his hand vaguely, the taut web of ligaments and muscles indecisive, imprecise, below his knuckles. “You know that life much better than I do, anyway.”

 

It’s the truth. His limited contact with this previously hidden part of the Lalondian family pretty much had dick squat on the number of times she’d been alone to its devices. 

 

He’d been ashamed to admit to Jane once, on a particularly (quiet, lonely, impossibly, surreally silent, and the kind of unthawable cold that has you fixed in a shivering labyrinth; mouse in the maze, can’t divorce itself from the wall) … trying night of the endless nuclear winter of his complex, that he’d been jealous. 

 

Jealous. 

 

Of the stories Roxy had told of trips to Paris, all the Americas, to Sydney. Of souvenirs upheld to the bad lighting of their Skype chats like a lion prince to his future subjects, of the way Jake’s eyes lit in wonder, the way he held on to every adventure and every word just as strongly as she did. 

Of the way she could talk of success in her family as if it were her own.  
A simple appreciation and happiness for the good things in someone else’s life. 

It looked so easy, and he’d chastised himself for every ignored call from his father. 

And he still hadn’t known anything about her, all along. 

In Purgatorio, the envious sit leaning against each other, their eyes sewn shut with iron wires. 

Blind, for all their closeness. 

… Fuck. By the time he’s done thinking, he doesn’t remember the past five minutes of movie he was supposed to be paying attention to. The dread of a pop quiz is heavy on his lungs and soul. 

But he’s nothing if not a scholar, so he hunkers down and watches like he’s never watched before. 

(And if his recollection isn’t perfect when she talks about it later 

Well

Guess the asshole who said the big screen was larger than life was just a silly asshole after all.) 

She had to admit, he's probably had far much more experience with cooking than she has, even if she's had plenty of chances to learn various exotic dishes or foods for the wealthy alone (though she couldn't help but feel annoyed at that one drink, cotton candy, water, and actual gold, who the fuck drinks real gold? Her mother apparently) she never learnt how to cook much, if any, of it. 

She remembered when they were younger, she’d cross the road to his just as empty home and he’d have cooked a perfect meal for the days his father wasn’t home and her mother had forgotten to feed them both. She’d bring her cat, Dirk would bring Cal down. It’d be an ideal meal. Some days they were royalty, others foreign leaders trying to assassinate the other. Pretend games for kids who had meals all on their own.  
They just weren’t kids anymore.

She slowly brings her arms back around him, side of her head pressed against his chest to watch the movie from the corner of her eye. Or from her peripheral vision when she lets her eyes unfocus as they stare at some part of his body, his hand, leg, whatever just so happened to be in her line of sight. 

She used to think, late at night when she couldn't sleep and even an attempted Skype call to Dirk hadn't solved her restlessness, that perhaps if she were good enough she could give him the affection, attention, love that he had never experienced with such a busy brother. Used to. Doesn't anymore, doesn't know if she'll turn out like her mother if she attempts to, doesn't know if she'll be like her aunt who may be worse. 

But she tries anyway doesn't she, she'll hug him when the fancy strikes, small touches, gentle touches. Touches that couldn't even hurt a butterfly's wing and those things are fragile as fuck. 

(She's trying.)

She wonders if, considering their age, she might be able to go somewhere else for the next summer. She wonders if she could take Dirk with her, take him to every place she's been or hasn't been. Wonders if he'll want to come with her, whether he'd put Japan on the top of the list if he did. 

Her fingers curl into his shirt, as though to say, at least for a second, 'mine.'

It’s no use, for all his stony-eyed eremitism. 

Not like anyone could tell, but Dirk prided himself on his practically flawless poker face as he walked the endless runway of day to day. Full royal flush, fuckers. Read it and weep. 

But she’s there and the movie drops to the sideline of his mind, despite his efforts. 

Down like an elevator with its cables cut.  
Bottom floor, no waiting. 

Just kidding. He was playing with a three of clubs, a 6 of hearts, two Digimon cards and a page from a mini-bible. 

And thus, the rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights. 

He could try meditation? Or tai chi? Something where it’s just you and some sort of mystical spiritual energy, synodic motion like the sun coming closer, like perihelion, like her warmth pressed against his side like they’d been in orbit for millennia before and would continue to be without the universe ever having a say otherwise– 

Jesus fuck, this was pretentious. 

Sure, he could pretend nothing was happening. But at what cost? 

It’s just like Christmas, right?  
If you don’t believe in Santa, you’re disqualified from anything under the family evergreen.  
Seeya on New Year’s, Jimmy. 

It’s now or never, asshole. 

This is your litmus test. 

Prove you’re not basic.

“Hey.” 

(He can practically count the freckles down her neck.) 

“Um.” 

(The moments where he thinks about kissing her are getting closer together, like blips in a radar forming into a pattern.) 

“….. I just want you to know,” 

(Having you around is like... it’s like coming home TO a home for the first time. 

It’s like playing Dead Snacks Yo for lifetimes of years only to find Tony Hawk: Pro Skater at your local McDonalds. 

It’s like finding yet another chicken nugget in a ten-piece package that helps make a good day better and a leftover milkshake waiting for you to help make the bad ones okay. It’s like stepping into the ball pit with all of the plastic fun and not having some kid’s soggy fries ruin your every aspiration in life. It’s like metaphors that don’t make much sense not mattering as much because it’s not about any specific, quantified content; none of that could replace the fact that it’s with you.) 

“We… should start dinner early! I’m hella hungry.” 

Fuck. 

“… Like the wolf,” 

Double fuck. 

“……. by Duran Duran.” Somewhere, in some far-reaching corner of Dirk’s mind, in an oasis-less desert much like the three wise men would’ve meandered through to see God Jr., a bomb drops. 

Boom. 

Fuck trifecta.  
The Father, Son, and Holy Fuck. 

Tres triángulo epítome.  
Fuck Trinity.  
Manhattan Project v2.0.  
Little Boy ain’t so little anymore.  
We’re all sons of bitches all over again. 

Dirk's half-open mouth stays deathly still, like lakes where fish don't move.

Her lips parted for a moment, heart stopping, would he? Did he? Could he? 

Should he? 

But no, no, definitely not. Dirk Strider did not feel that kind of way for one Roxy Lalonde. 

It was not possible. 

So instead of feeling like her heart had sunk, or rather been grabbed and carried to the edge of a balcony before being dropped to the concrete below like one of those science projects you do in like year eight when your science teacher is trying to teach you how shock absorption and parachutes work but really they just want you to break a few eggs. 

With no  
Intention  
Of making  
An omelette 

So really just a massive waste of some pretty good eggs, eggs with potential, futures, families. 

She shouldn’t have of expected reciprocation. Not in quiet spaces like this, not with their bodies curled up with a projector now showing a blank nothing on the wall. Why would she? He’d shown no indication. It was always just her hope. Hope over and over again. Hope was nothing substantial. 

Her fingers relax and uncurl from his shirt, but before she pulls away from his chest and stands in order to stop the movie and head back up the stairs with him she has to compose her face and voice. 

She refuses to sound disappointed because of something he did or didn't say.  
“Dirk… You are literally banned from making any noise resembling Hungry Like the Wolf, or any Duran Duran song, for the rest of our mortal lives,  
C’mon, dork, let’s go make some fuckin’ delish as fuck food so that we can rub our totes hella chill rebellious nature into the family’s faces.” 

She pulls away, stands up and runs one hand through the every slightly messy hair on her head as with the other one she offers a hand to help him up. 

She makes a mental note to herself 

Try to avoid using eggs. 

It's now cannibalism.

The weight of his words haven't registered in him yet, his head still was playing catch-up with the shattered implication, was still rotating in the gravity of the mental equivalent of Matrix Unicode hexdump. Words had dropped from his mouth like bombs, acidic and biting, utterly thoughtless and unrepentant, whistling through the air into bursting; misaligned firecrackers catching pedestrians in the fray. They had spun into the air like thick pencil onto paper, letters all sharp angles and painful asymmetry and hurling themselves into flow-of-consciousness spills, with too much centrifugal force for all he wants to backpedal. 

There is a strangled silence in his throat where words should have been, but a demon wielding a flaming pitchfork had stolen in and made off with his diction tucked under one arm like a firefighter saving a large cat. The demon now sat reading a lengthy novel, tastefully lit in the flickering light of the smoking brazier at the far end of his cave-like abode. He places his wine flute down upon an old bronzed sandalwood coaster to stroke a horned, flaming cat. 

The cat makes a sound like two predator birds having sex. 

It’s said that the river Lethe, which runs between the border of Hell and Purgatory, requires a penitent soul to bathe and forget their sins in it before moving in transit from Hell to Purgatory. 

Dirk Strider takes Roxy Lalonde’s hand and welcomes himself back from the dead. 

“Y-yeah. 

Let’s.” 

He stretches, joints popping like an orchestra of broken nuts, rezips what’s come undone of his favorite zipoffables and sews together what’s left of his pride into a small, delicate embroidery. Knit one, pearl this, motherfucker. 

She probably wouldn't have wanted to turn him down and make it awkward anyway.  
They were friends.  
It was easier to pretend nothing happened. 

Nothing  
At  
All. 

Yeah, the spiteful Dirk in the attic wasn’t going to leave him alone about this one for a long time. He was running around up there, like a raccoon looting through a kingdom of trash, bearing immutable and raucous, rabid witness to the hella jank patterns unfolding in this gross-ass wallpaper around him. 

The gnawing, looming threat of a Fuckup x4 Combo was on the horizon though, so Dirk follows her lead without further comments. 

He can still feel her caught breath running down his collarbone.

She tries to not let go of his hand, trying to not draw attention to it either, casual, nonchalant. If she just doesn't think about it she can pretend he said he loves her and holds her hand because he wants to feel the smooth skin that covers the muscle, ligaments, veins and bones, that he wants to play with the fake nails that she stuck on the top of her own. 

Pretending he wants to have something like that to do with her at all. 

She doesn't wear that kind of almost hurt, absence of relief really, on her sleeve or her cheek or anywhere on her body. She wears it like little girls wear their first training bra, like a mortician will cover and paint over the face of the dead to make them seem living. 

Wears it underneath the concealer she has made out of years of  
Brilliant,  
Impenetrable,  
Unnoticeable,  
Perfect,  
Acting. 

She brings him up the stairs, loathing the lack of contact as she is forced (well not really) to let go in order to slide the bookcase back over the hidden entryway to the stairs, beckoning with a finger for him to follow as she walks to the kitchen. 

(Their contact is broken as he follows her as she skirts through what Scooby Doo could only fucking dream of seeing, through hallways like blackened, bone-dry throats. 

He follows her  
And  
He justifies. 

The brain treats rejection like physical pain. 

The amygdala is your emotional centre of the brain. 

It can send messages down the spinal cord to the middle of your adrenal gland, the andrenalmandala, where it can trigger a flight or fight response. Often, the extent to which our brains can command our bodies to fight is ultimately less than it is compared to the hereditary and instinctual urge to flee. 

The question is whether standing still can be considered running.)

It's such a perfect kitchen. 

The kind of kitchen you would expect to see in homes with white picket fences, where little darling wives lived while their little darling husbands worked so that they could feed their little darling children and their little darling dog. Where little darling wives kiss their little darling husband's cheek to say goodbye and welcome home. Where little darling wives are the ultimate Stepford wives and they are not, never were, related to not so darling girls and women who hold onto their hurt and smash half-finished bottles of wine against the sides of houses after arguing over who should inherit this and who should get that. 

She wished she was the one who designed this house, and not her mother. So it didn’t have purple marks where fingernails had scratched down over blueprints and examined stone for countertops.

She swallows, puts on her Lalonde Is Fine™ grin as she turns to Dirk, it won't falter here, not where everything is perfect and the sharp corners are back but they won't cut you like they would in the main Lalonde house. Where the air is completely and utterly sterile and it fills your lungs and seems to dry your throat, hospital air. 

All metaphorically of course, because this was no hospital, and the air was soft with the scent of incense burning on the window sill. 

“So, Dirk, what’cha wanna make? We’ve got plenty-a ingredients in here to make at least seven hundred million recipes south and north of the equator. Pick and choose.”

He glances around the quaint, almost stereotypically domestic feel of this lived-in kitchen, so different from a hotel room’s casual, almost unintentional bleeding of ‘place to cook’ into ‘place to run out of interesting channels to watch’.

A fierce surge of want floods through him. 

He justifies. 

There are several thousand, thousand neuroanatomical reasons for every helixing path his thoughts may take. 

There was Certainty he is correct, certainty that that was what she wanted, before he’d pulled back. 

The feeling of Certainty can be triggered in most humans without the need for facts or reasoning, using electric stimulation over the amygdala. Monkeys have been shown to house similar tendencies when stimulated, adopting behaviours they wouldn’t normally take,  
Taking risks they wouldn’t ordinarily make  
Raking in aches,  
Bacon n eggs,  
Breakfast before breaking in  
Craniums and radius  
And bones of the legs. 

Stop rapping, you horse’s ass. 

He justifies. 

Rabindranath Tagore had said that a mind all logic is a knife all blade, and it bleeds the hand that wields it. 

And he’ll be damned before she bleeds for him, bleeds because he couldn’t hold back. 

He justifies. 

Forgetting is good for the brain: deleting unnecessary information helps the nervous system retain its plasticity. 

He settles on the task at hand.  
“We’re making us some spaghetti fucking Bolognese. How much ground beef do y’all have.”

Spaghetti Bolognese, she has the ingredients for that. She has the ingredients for most things here. Doesn’t know the recipes, can’t cook for shit. But she has the ingredients.

Basic. 

She knows the recipe to certain emotions though, testosterone, estrogen, dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin. All the chemicals that you need to make a bit of love, governing your sex drive, attachment to another, and, of course, your preference in partners. A certain balance of these chemicals and a clear person to trigger the release of them into the brain creates love. It happens over time or all at once, the correct amount of ingredients can make a long lasting love.

She wonders if her brain played a cruel trick on itself when it released those chemicals when she had been thinking of Dirk. Surely it could have of guessed that he wouldn't have that same chemical release into his own brain, Roxy was just a friend, a best friend and nothing more. 

Always a bridesmaid and never a bride they say. 

Roxy doubts she'll make it to bridesmaid. 

After all, how could she be a bridesmaid when even Janey doesn't believe certain aspects of her life, doesn't trust her fully and completely like one should such a close friend. 

Sometimes she wonders if Dirk trusts her like a best friend should. She tries to push that paranoia away every time. 

She tries to make her opening of the fridge contain as much dramatic flair as she can muster for it, though perhaps there is a certain limpness in her wrists, heavy weight on her shoulders, down turn in the corners of her lips. 

She turns back to him, those trays you get of ground beef in her hands, the brightest grin she can manage decorating her face. 

She's not hurt, she tells herself, she's not hurt because she expected this. 

“More than two trays of it, certainly. We gotta bunch’a crap in here, Dirk, just feel free to rummage around an’ crap.”

Don't look in the drawer, her thoughts beg, don't look in the drawer by the fridge because that is where all the reserve alcohol is, the shitty crap she drinks when she can't steal into the main house to grab something because someone else is there and she /wished/ she had put a damn lock on that drawer. 

(How much does a lock cost? For that kind of drawer. Fuck, why is she wondering about the cost of a fucking /lock/ when she's currently on an island her family /owns/ that has FOUR houses on it?! Is she really that worried about Dirk finding that damn alcohol? 

Why wouldn't she be? 

For all she knows he could be extremely disappointed in her if he found out, think she's just like her family. Be angry with her. 

Possibly. 

Definitely.)

She doesn't know why she's so worried now. 

He's her best friend. 

Who is she trying to impress.

There is an eternity of things he’s learned for sure directly from Roxy. 

But only two presently come to mind. 

#1  
In programming, "!" indicates negation, or "the opposite of," An even shorter shorthand for NOT, in most coding languages. 

#2  
The more exhaustively, desperately positive she gets, the sadder she probably feels. 

Let’s do some math. 

If (!(r == t)), with r being Roxy and t being feels shitty, then she’ll only compile and execute statements where, to the outside eye, r does NOT equal t. 

He’d been fooled in the first few minutes of her strain-faced antics, when it was just curl of farfalle pasta meeting the boil of water. (“I mean hey, I’m no Guy Fieri, but I can whip up a mean fucking pot of water.”) It was a companionable silence, he thought, distracted by the details of do they have the kind of tomato paste without the huge-ass diced tomatoes in ‘em and were her relatives going to pay her back later for this pointed disobedience and why was he such a dick and how much basil do you even use again so that this kitchen doesn’t smell like the FIRST time he’d forgotten. 

(It’d been fucking ungodly.) 

(All theists please avert your eyes.) 

But her eyes followed him.  
Followed him warily as he  
Attempted to loot around the kitchen and  
Attempted to  
collect ingredients but had them quickly, almost violently handed to him in a strict, utilitarian assembly line of one of his steps closer to a drawer straight into her waterfall of activity and smiles that didn’t reach her eyes and a stream of undiluted optimism that never seemed to still, like electrons under a cathode ray tube, whirring faintly like angry, shaken bees in a glass jar. 

It was almost like she didn’t want him to do anything, to look at or touch anything.  
..... He’s missed something here.  
Something large and important. Catastrophically, cataclysmically important.  
The four horsemen are looting through their umbrella stands as theories instantly precipitate in a freezing needlepoint in his head.

Maybe he’s just being an asshole and she really likes cooking? Or. Doesn’t want him, as a guest, to help? As if she’s indebted, as host, to mount the preparations? 

Maybe his social ineptitude earlier had set them down a careening path to Skullcrunch Gulch, wherein every other passenger along the way knew the danger and had bailed, and the only reason she was still even seeing out this debacle was because the alternative was the motley crew of gnarled cronies outside these calm walls. 

It's said the Norse god Odin sacrificed his eye to gain knowledge of the past, present, and futur – 

Stop,  
Fucking  
Stop it. 

Just ask.

Just ask! 

Just talk to her just talk and ask and fix your gaze on earth for one fucking second and try to show you care for once you goddamn Philistine. 

The sauce is put on a calm simmer, and Dirk follows suit. Faces Roxy as he leans against the counter, casual as breakfast, a mixing spoon turning end-over-end in his spidering hands before he works up the nerve. 

“Hey. You okay?”

She bites down hard on her lip, picturing molecular formulas instead of focusing on how Dirk would, could, react if (when? No, if.) He found that alcohol. Molecular formulas were good, familiar, and reliable. Emotions weren't, no emotions fluctuated, but formulas didn't. They were always the same. 

Just like how fire was generally always the same, you could rely on it to burn, to warm, to be generally the same colour. 

Could rely on water to be wet, salty or not, a good source of hydration, clear usually, sea is blue. 

Could rely on stars to eventually super nova and become black holes. 

Could rely gravity to make things fall and stick to the earth. 

Could rely on Dirk to be a constant (uncorrupted, pure, untainted, clean, hope inducing) in her life. 

She barely registers that he asked a question, she's so wrapped up in reliabilities that it is a wonder she didn't accidentally burn herself on something. 

So she gives him a smile (her act is impenetrable, she thinks, unaware of Dirk's little maths session that involved how he cracks her shell of faux happiness. 

If she knew she'd love that he did. 

And hate it.) 

“What? Of course I’m okay, I’m always okay you know that,” was that the wrong thing to say? Should she double back and correct that so that it doesn't seem as though she puts on an act to seem okay to everyone? 

“Well, no, not always but- Look, you get what I mean, nothin’ drags me down, y’know!” 

She wasn't sure that answer was much better, so she clears her throat, starts opening drawers to find plates, forks, knives, grabs a bottle of some brand of orange soda from the fridge and fills glasses to keep her hands busy. If she imagines hard enough the orange liquid is some kind of chemical that she is experimenting with and not the first thing she had asked to be stocked in the house's fridge for Dirk, and Dirk alone. 

What is she to do? They don't have to cook to distract themselves from needing to talk. 

She's run out of science.

Things to say drift through his head like confetti through thin hands as he watches her agonize in the moments before realizing he’s looking. It occurs to him that maybe this isn’t the right time to ask. That maybe once their stomachs are full and his tongue isn’t in a spasming knot and he can look her in the eye (at least, as much as his opaque neurotics allow) without her coming up with a million ways to split her attention, it’ll be more appropriate. Maybe then he might even be able to convince her that what’s important to her is important to him. 

But he catches himself gawking again and it all but confirms to Dirk that maybe Roxy doesn’t need this right now. Maybe she doesn’t deserve suffering having the spaces between her words so fixated on, or the nuance of the turn of her head examined in 1080p via overbearing scrying sunglasses. Maybe nobody did. 

He doesn’t question he loves her, but does question what it means for a guy like him to love. 

It’s Dirk’s 15th summer, and Not Dirk’s 1st. 

Evening was bleeding into night and June had brought Jane clear sinuses and an even clearer head, a fog dissipating like anesthetic giving way to a finer clarity. Night was still barely cresting above the slain remains of evening when Jake had called asking how he should handle Jane confessing, to which Dirk hadn’t yet worked up the cold cruelty required to lie about. Instead, his voice wove half-remembered tapestries in great murals composed of bluster and monologue, of friendly, serious chiding and malformed, mostly top-of-the-head and internet-informed relationship advice. 

(“Yeah, exactly. Just maybe try and slow down sometime, dude. Do some more listening instead of fucking around too much trying to have all your thoughts listened to. Baby Jesus knows you’ve got plenty. And, hey.  
I… I’ve seen you two at your worst and know that you deserve each other at your best.  
Go get ‘em, tiger.”) 

Jake had said something that sounded like tremendous thanks it means all the world to me dirk but Dirk was a gargoyle playing spectator sports, perched over a distant stone parapet watching himself smile Roxy’s same slightly curdled smile in the monitor’s reflection superimposed over Jake’s face. So Not Dirk said no problem bud to which Jake had said VERY BEST budmeister lite I think you intended to say hahahoho and Not Dirk laughs too. 

Call to Jake doublepistols English!, duration 00:23:14. 

Time is relative. 

And Dirk-days were the slowest days of all, that first glorious new -couple week. 

It was as if the moonsetter had developed arthritis, felt the ache of ages of hard work with subpar health benefits and gave up the ghost to let it drift lazily through accepting stars. 

As if the sunslammer left in a hurry, so fast that they left the door open as it affixed a great and cycloptic gaze on him and firmly held the night in the limbo of evening like a bug caught in amber. 

His evenings bled into nights bled into days and weeks and months and he bled into them right back. 

Forgetting is good for the brain: deleting unnecessary information helps the nervous system retain its plasticity. 

Not Dirk was a plastic city built over a skeleton of him, perfect angles of skyscraping ivory like a movie star. 

Pristine  
Untouchable  
And so good at recognizing other, sister cities. 

But not now, not now. Later, he promises, and gives Roxy a thumbs up and a smile he hopes isn't too concerned. 

“… Holy shit, is that orange Fanta.” 

Mother of a fuck, he said that out loud.

Roxy barely remembered what she had said before she left for that fifteenth summer. 

She remembered what she’d talked about with Jane when she’d taken the motorboat with Rose to the nearest coastal town for the day. The two gorging themselves on brownies, chocolate and honeycomb candies while they both rapid-fire messaged friends back at their respective homes. She remembered Rose with an all too familiar smirk as she stared down at her phone screen while they took advantage of a café’s free wifi. There was chocolate at the corner of her mouth. There was walls of light blue texts on Roxy’s own phone screen. Jane lamenting her romantic fate.

TG: u kno ur never gna get w him if u don’t get W him  
TG: its june gurl u can speak w/o soundin lik uv got no nostrils if udont tel him ur always gona regret not doin it ykno  
TG: slike tht uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh  
TG: u kno tht show we marathon 4 like an entire month bc it was trashy an trashy stuff is so GOOD an ther was tht plotline were like wht ws his name chris was super into tht chick an just was totes MAD depressd when she got engaged n shit  
TG: thtll b u an i KNO how much u got frustr8ed @ him  
TG: ur gonna have to say somethin ok? im rootin for u janey 

Going back to that free wifi three weeks later and hearing the news had been a tremendous day for her. The pride that soared through her at her friend’s bravery and success. Heart warming. 

Had it been because of what she said? If she hadn’t of said anything, would there be no one with her now because Jake and Dirk were off canoodling back home?

Obviously she didn’t mention that tiny detail to Dirk. 

After all. 

She knew as well as Dirk did that he liked Jake, like she liked Dirk. 

Was it selfish to say that she kind of liked the fact that even if he didn’t like her that he wasn’t kissing someone else? 

She knew that kind of bliss couldn’t last forever, but at least she could think about kissing him without feeling bad over someone else. 

She shoots him a proper grin, true, bright, real, sincere, and slides him a glass across the counter over towards him like a bartender would slide a glass of scotch over to someone. 

Nothing spilling, smooth travelling, practiced hand. 

Could she not say it now? 

No.  
She’ll wait, if nothing happens before the last day, then she’ll tell him right before they drop him off home. 

If the words don’t choke her or stuff her throat so full that no sound or air can escape until she puts on a smile and tells him goodbye, that she thought the summer was awesome, that she can’t wait to see him again. 

“I thought you might like it. I asked for it to be stocked up in the fridge when you agreed to come with. Orange is your colour and you’ve never bought anything else if it was available, 

so…”

(Nice. None of this on the rocks bullshit, just pour it to me straight, bartender. 

He accepts the barista’s glass, palm upturned like a master fucking sommelier as he raises it to his nose, sniffs at it haughtily. His lips thin, as he tips the glass to them, stroking his chin afterward in scholarly rapture. 

In Hinduism, the word ‘soma’ refers to a both a deity and a ritually imbibed drink which is said to reward its drinker with immortality. 

A nineteen….. Thirty-something vintage blend, definitely. Italian. With… a dash of merlot. Subtle, yet heady. A bit sweeter and more full than his refined tongue expected, (off brand was much easier to find) but it was a pleasant surprise he couldn’t help but hum in agreement at, one elbow in a lazy lean over the counter as he resists loosing the laugh building in his chest at Roxy shyly shrugging it off. )

She could say, “Hey, like, remember that time when you, Janey, Jake and I went to that new shoppin’ centre that opened up?”

She could say, “And, hey, remember when we all got lost and texted each other to meet up at the food court but I found you near that nerd ass anime store?”

Could say, “And how I had to practically drag you away from your pony waifu’s image ‘cause it was hella expensive and limited edition, 

And how I promised that I’d buy you a litre of fuckin’ Fanta if you’d just come with me to the food court and then we spent like an hour a waiting for Janey and Jake because they got soooo lost.

And remember like five days later I took you back to that stupid store just so you could point out the thing-y and I could buy it for you?”

She could say, and as those words flowed through her head, they spilled from out mouth like a waterfall of word vomit. 

Like a waterfall of memory that got liquefied into words because she needs to fill a silence before he starts thinking that there is anything wrong, and she needs to figure out why her grins and smiles aren’t doing what they used to and whether it is because she’s gotten slack with them or if it is because he has known her for so long that it doesn’t matter if she smiles because he just knows if there is something on her mind that is hurting or bothering her and she wonders if that is true then does he know that she loves him because that is what bothers her the most. 

Even her thoughts are a constant fall of word vomit. 

Disgusting. 

“You still have it?”

And she talks and he listens, the nostalgia of two years back hitting him like a haymaker. 

He could smell the rain, the damp asphalt glistening with a thick nail-polish coat of it, rain-trails sliding down both their faces as they shielded Rainbow Dash’s precious, fluffy body from peril with their very lives. Her wet hair comes down hard on her ears but she still grins a shit-eating grin and the pang of want that comes with it, that echoes across his skin and crawls along it like an unscratchable itch isn’t in him, 

Not yet 

But it’s very  
Very  
Close. 

They’d dully clinked together plastic cups of Fanta back at his apartment, drank it in with a glow of success while talking shit on the filthy subforum-creating echo-chamber trashcan of ideology Redditor who would’ve defiled this sacred body if not for this purchase. Her makeup was coming off on the towel she was using and he doesn’t say a word, not a word. 

She might try to fix it. 

As if there’s something to be fixed. 

He’d showed her sneak previews of Wifi-dead twists of silicon she hadn’t had the chance to snoop on, the rough weldscarred metal shaped into joints and sprockets by the joints and sprockets of rough, weldscarred hands. He showed her a small box that opened up to rap poorly at them both and she said beep fuckin boop back to it and he felt silly for ever feeling this private pyramid of many-colored wires and mottled steel was a maze within a maze, nothing but a soulless, colder than cryosleep husk for rats to skitter into and become skeletons. 

In Ancient Greek, soma translates to “body” as distinct from the soul or psyche, 

Or heart. 

And for all the foreign steels he hadn’t collected in the dark of that room  
And the gaps in his projects’ patchwork code  
For the Dirk-weeks and Dirk-months against the grain of reality telling him otherwise  
In that moment,  
Maybe he wasn’t missing anything. 

Of course he remembered. 

Of course he still had it.

“Of course,” he says, and means it so hard the assurance of his tone almost shakes him. 

“I meant to bring Dash, but, figured you’d be a good enough pillow anyway,” 

He only registers how Freudian a slip that fucking is once he has an excuse to break eye contact, thankfully. Grabs the pot of pasta with one mitted hand, the sauce with another, sets them on the table. Even fucking pulls back her chair for her. 

“Bone apple-fuckin’ teet. If you’ll ‘scuse my French.”

Chivalry is alive.

Void definition, Law. Having no legal force or effect; not legally binding or enforceable.  
Void definition, completely lacking; devoid: void of understanding.  
Void, barren, shy, destitute. 

Dirk Strider, admirable, alluring, charming, dazzling, elegant, enticing, gorgeous, graceful, grand, ravishing, resplendent, sublime, attractive, beguiling, captivating, enchanting, engaging, enthralling, mesmeric, refined, striking, tantalizing, and tempting. 

She can come up with so many synonyms and descriptors for him, and so little for void, for something she would rather feel all day, every day, rather than constantly have her mother and aunt /as/ her mother and aunt. 

She grins and laughs softly at (his Freudian slip) his wording and sits down in the chair he pulled out for her. She wants to kiss his cheek like a wife, girlfriend, lover might when having the same act performed for them. In fact, she very, very nearly (just the slightest hint of movement) does it. 

But Roxy Lalonde has excellent control over her body when it counts and so with that barely there hint of movement to her sits her ass the fuck down. 

Another fact about Roxy Lalonde,  
When she was younger her mother used to make her take acting lessons. She uses those skills to her advantage often enough. 

“Ooh, lala, Dirk, ain’t this the best thing I’ll have eaten this entire summer.” 

The best thing because it is him and not some cook her mother hired for that particular dinner. 

Best thing because it is only the two of them and not her equally as ashamed, unnerved, anxious, and upset cousin or her mother and aunt. 

You see,  
Roxy's mother and aunt are something like Abrahamic gods.  
All seeing.  
All knowing.  
With this love mere mortals cannot comprehend.  
And she'll murmur and say that they love her they do, even when they make red liquid and glass shards rain against the side of houses, inside the walls of their homes.  
Even when on their drunkest days they might say these hurtful words that make her so paranoid about the people around her that she'll even start believing that her friends are only her 'friends' out of pity or better options. Because they want something from her, because she's a Lalonde and Lalonde has status and money and influence.  
They work in mysterious ways that is all. 

But Roxy has never felt more unfaithful to them than she has right now with Dirk here before her, eyes hidden behind those damn Kamina shades, her heart skipping a beat as she takes a second to simply admire the features he hasn't put a mask over beside the simply one of neutrality. 

She feels like she has been newly converted to some other kind of religion. 

She feels like maybe that is why her mother says some of the things she does, about her, about Dirk, about how he'll never love her because she just wasn't his type- 

No. 

He just wasn't her type. 

That is what she had said. 

After all, Lalondes are old money, and despite their semi respect for Dirk's father, 

They would never,  
Ever,  
Accept Dirk. 

It makes her desire to keep him close to her ever stronger, because she's been told she can't have him, because she does love him and sometimes love hurts. 

But it doesn't hurt like the bottles must have hurt when they got smashed. 

“Now sit down, Dirk, if this has been poisoned I’m takin’ you down with me.”

“Damn. Saw right through my keikaku. Though it’s equally possible I’ve built an immunity to said poison, and this doesn’t help you at all,” he tells her, helpfully. 

And he sits. The sauce spreads over the pasta, and it’s a little too thin and he didn’t add enough pressed garlic and if this was Hell’s Kitchen he’d be choking on-stage, retreating to the bathroom with great heaving breaths. Mom’s spaghetti. 

He’s being dramatic. It’s only barely subpar. It’ll do. 

It only occurs to him he’s still wearing the oven mitts halfway through the start of his second bite. He is a thing that would look very much LIKE sheepishness on another person, but Striders don’t do that. 

He wonders if his mother would. 

If she was the contrast, the beauty to the beast.  
The heart in a chassis of tin, a good organ among plastic bodies 

If she liked robots and old cartoons from other countries.  
If she would have sat in rooms filled with the product of years and the sum of inspiration and perspiration, hunched and bleeding out for all her supposed genius. If she had a Not Her that laughed away the first thing she thought could be hers, if she would have nursed a grain of selfish, keening hunger that hardened like diamond close to her chest for anything of her mother when the hunger for her father turned into something immutably and inexorably hollow. 

The pull of a black hole can compress any matter to infinite density. 

He wonders if she would have baked and delivered muffins for her friends on sick days and stood with a poise that was approachable yet unshakable, for all her lack of height. If she would have given her neighbors piano lessons, harbored a crush on Hercule Poirot, but loved silly boys with sillier vocabularies. 

He wonders if her curiosities would’ve been endless, if her room would’ve been coated in a second wallpaper of posters, if she would talk animatedly about anything anything anything, like being tuned to a personalized radio station, one where the voices are hopeful, hearty, and obliviously golden. 

He wonders if her lips would perk like she’s let slip a secret that she wasn’t supposed to tell, with starlit-blonde hair and dreams of being sprawled out on dozens of cats and kind hands whose fingers had hundreds of hurricane typos curled within them. If she would have been strong and open and real enough to send those typos anyway. If she would have been his best friend. 

If she would get home past when the buses run and smell like cheap beer and call him Dave for the first time. 

In his sixth summer, he’d accepted it as a game. Something playful, something strange and silly, but also something that only the two of them knew the strangeness and silliness of. 

It’s obvious, in hindsight. 

For all their close-to-home nonsense, he’d always felt a particular affection to blasting through the celebrity lookalikes page. People who were, but weren’t quite those stars. People whose cities of plastic went through the same routines of architecture, who had the same streets and routes, yet whose small backbone of life is immeasurably different for all its concrete. They are all shallow resemblances, caricatures with the same features in roughly the same places. 

But  
He flips a page 

And looks at the plateau-mouth and sunglasses of a boy named Dave. Feels a clarity like polished mirrors. 

Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia is the scientific term for brain freeze. Contrary to myth, it can occur outside of the consumption of ice cream. 

A rising, glamorous shooting star wouldn’t have any shortage of partners.

Nor a collection of  
People  
(Better people)  
To call their own. 

He needs to stop thinking about this. 

His gaze drifts anxiously from her face to the spread of her own plate. 

“No offense, but you’re gonna stay short forever if you don’t eat your daily recommended poison.”

“I’m pretttttyyy shit that if I do ear your poison then I’ll be short until I die, which’ll be after I have the poison.”

All the same she takes a large, perhaps dramatically so, mouthful of the spaghetti. 

It's no Italian made high class chef dish. 

But that is what makes it absolutely perfect. She almost wished she had grabbed candles, turned the lights off. 

Maybe she would have tried to play the romanticism off as something ironic. 

She has a lot of 'maybes' in her thoughts when it comes to Dirk Strider, more than a lot, more than a hundred 

More than a thousand?

Either way, she does know of a few certainties when it comes to him. 

He is the anime.  
His waifu is a blue pony with a rainbow mane and tail.  
He builds robots.  
His father is never home.  
(If you can manage to catch him staring off into space it is easy to admire his features, shape of his nose, his jaw, the way his hair falls and is spiked up by who knows how many gallons of product.)  
He was, or still is, in love with Jake English.  
And he thinks about a lot heavier stuff than his soliloquies, rambles, and poetic info-dumps would let on.  
And he is so anime he may as well be starring in his own anime right now. 

What does that make her then? Just that poor character that gets turned down once she confesses? 

The character that is always so ditzy and clumsy and doesn't seem as smart as he does? Is that what she is in this- in his life?  
It felt like that some days. The things people could say about them both. Oh thank God she has him with her. She’s so clumsy, a typical blonde. 

She has to pinch herself to remember that this isn't an anime. That this is real life and real people don't fit into character tropes. 

It takes a moment for her to realize she's been staring into space and eating like something mechanical while she has been thinking about that. 

She turns her gaze back to Dirk, a smile (not as taunt or ever so slightly sour as they are when she's just trying to seem happy) forms and for a moment she wishes he would take those sun glasses off. 

She isn't sure if that is because she feels it would be a sign of trust in her or because she wants to memorize his eyes before her mother inevitably arrives to coax them to dinner before realizing what they did and planning to have a cold fury talk with Roxy later. 

“Have I ever mentioned that you are-“ the most amazing person she has met, a true god among mortals, an angel in this island garden of grimdark hidden horrors that lie at the bottom of a bottle, a light in the dark that is the Lalonde family she was born into, a hint of proper love for the first time since her father left to actual make something of his life instead of pressing and compressing himself to be the perfect Lalonde that he just wasn't born to be and hates oh so much. 

"The biggest an’ sweetest dork I have ever met?” 

Close enough.

The disbelief rises so strongly in his throat that he has to snort. He wants to wince. To make the sort of expression you usually see on people who just had a transcendent religious experience, or earthquake victims. 

Do sweet guys really pine after their friends? 

Do they convince themselves in their minds of what their friends really want, high on the chemicals of comfort and closeness and late night movies?

Do they sometimes offer the stigmata curve of their wrists to the sky and wish they said  
Something else anything else don’t let this happen don’t let him go without a fight  
He’s gullible.  
You could say anything. 

So easy, so slow and so, so convincing. 

(It wouldn’t work out you’re not right for one another  
Does Jane make fucking robots  
Nah man  
Not like I do.  
She would never like you like I do.) 

The thought doesn’t tempt him anymore, the siren song mute, after months of screaming.  
But that doesn’t change the fact that it’d taken Not Dirk to be a good friend.

His antithesis his inverse his celebrity lookalike. 

Roxy deserved better than acceptable, presumptuous spaghetti. 

… And he’s gotta stop monopolizing his head with edgy self-loathing sympathy-for-the-poor commentary. 

Back in meatspace, he notes that something about her tone is quiet, and he thinks he can see the indecision written into the pauses between her sentences. At least she likes the spaghetti. And it was prepared relatively quickly, too; the sun still sits shimmering on the horizon. 

It’s a weird shift from the light pollution of the city. Darkness falls reluctantly here, a slow burn compared to the mainland’s own inky drop. 

He decides to make it easier on both of them and talk some bullshit. 

“First off, we both know I’m cooler than a freshly zamboni’d ice rink. Like, kid drops their soda in a square mile radius of me, cringes and waits for the inevitable wave of Dr. Pepper to hit their socks, but to no avail.” 

Dirk takes a (melo) dramatic pause, raises his fork in the air… then plunges it downward, straight into the spaghetti in a swift, sharp dive. 

“Clunk. Shit's solid ice, motherfucker.” 

Then he stabs the fork straight at Roxy. His eyebrows furrow, accusatory and thick.

“But, really, you’re like the fuckin’ Sauron of being a dork. In this ivory castle, you’re practically the literal lord of the dorks, so look who’s Tolkien.” 

She snorts, despite herself.  
He takes an indignant bite of spaghetti. 

“I’ve gotta admit though: you may never get on my bad side again at this point. I may not even have a bad side right now. In a few hours, the Fanta will pass the Rubicon of my darker, deeper recesses and come out sinless at the other end. Hope your island fish like soda.”

“Please do not feed the fish soda from your piss, they’ll drown or somethin’, it’s bad for their gills, and lungs.”  
He's a dork, just look at him, using his spaghetti to be overly dramatic, what a fucking nerd. 

“An’ if anyone is the Sauron of being a dork, Dirk Strider, it has to be you or Jake there’s no in between here.” 

She takes another bite, practically inhaling the crap right now, before (whether or not it is an act of defiance against her mother or a 'i fuckin own this table, mate' thing) she puts her feet up on the table. Her fingers rising and forming peace signs to imitate the pointed parts of his glasses. 

“I mean, c’mon. You straight up have shades ripped right from the cartoony bosom of an anime, Kamina’s gonna come callin’ lookin’ for those y’know. Not to mention your body pillow. Your life practically is an anime, got all the tropes along with it.” 

Roxy thinks love is like plenty of things.  
Icecream.  
Fire.  
Oxygen.  
Adrenaline. 

Icecream and adrenaline seemed to fit together well so far, a few reminders about listening and they were all good to go.

Fire consumes oxygen.  
But without it, it dies.  
If a fire dies then the air is cold and unforgiving.  
Or maybe love is like a burning candle and a moth.  
The moth is probably going to have their wings set on fire at some point, unless it can help or teach that flame to lick at its body just a little bit kinder. 

Roxy- She just doesn't know which one she is.

A moth.  
Or a flame. 

“Do you wanna head back to the beach tomorrow or once it’s dark or somethin’? It’s pretty beautiful at night or early mornin’.” 

She doesn't want to be here when her mother comes calling, is what she might be saying. 

She also might be saying that she wants to spend some time with him where she has an excuse to cuddle up to him in order to protect them both from freezing completely and utterly. 

“Could take a few blankets to share.”

He can’t fault her for wanting to go and see the beach at this time of day, though it’d necessitate said blankets and maybe even some hand warmers.  
A portable stove.  
A squirt bottle of sriracha. A fucking Snuggie. 

Damn cold out there, after all. 

He can't fault her for it. 

(Not to mention he’ll have an excuse to maybe huddle closer to her than what would be appropriate for two friends.) 

Fuck. The body pillow, the objectification and demonization of platonic lady friends, the douche-shades. 

It’s confirmed:  
Dirk Strider was a professional asshole.  
(He also does sing-o-grams and children’s birthday parties, folks.) 

The rest of his pasta flies by, and he stands, both hands spread on the table like a fervent televangelist as he faces her. It will be just-friends them and the wind and the beach and the weight of the knowledge that this may not be one of the last pains he has to swallow of their just-friends misadventures. 

Unlike many religions, Buddhism has no single central text that is universally referred to by all traditions. 

Its constituents are not rooted in a scissor-straight progression of writ to preacher to congregation. 

They basically wing it. 

“… I accept, but… only if you admit how Samwise I truly Gamgee,”  
It is a heavy toll to pay, both for her to admit and a heavy hit for his coolguy reputation to say it. 

But her genuine laughs, the ones where she gets back to looking like she loves the world and means it, are more than worth it. 

He may not have seen her at her worst. 

May not have all the savvy-guy knowledge he constantly masturbatorily waxes lyrical about when it comes to her  
(Or when it comes to anything) 

May probably start ranting about how Peter Jackson’s interpretation should be the only LoTR interpretation that exists if he keeps fucking thinking about it 

But her best is something that keeps getting better, and not being around to see that would suck much harder than knowing he missed a moment of sunshine brighter than God. 

“Do it. Say my name. Call me fucking Ishmael.”

He earns a laugh from her readily enough, his dramatic acts and the bullshit that spills from his mouth like water spills from a tipped glass simply makes her light up. Sending her into giggles, chuckles, and all kinds of fucking laughter. It’s the kind of laugh that hurts your stomach, the kind you have when someone you love knocks you out of your own head and back to reality, whoop there goes gravity. It’s the laugh that reminds you it’s okay to not have love, because there is still love even if it’s not romantic. 

Ain't he a fucking miracle worker? 

She pushes her plate to the side, they'll be coming back to it anyway and dishes can wait for a while. It isn't like they'll be brutally murdered of struck down by a stray and wrathful god if they leave two plates and a bunch of other crap out for a bit instead of simply sterilizing it as soon as their hands touched the flawless surface. 

Flawless. 

She's only ever used that word without sarcasm or irony when referring to Dirk. 

She swings her legs down from the table, pushes her chair back and raises an eyebrow at him. Smirking to hold back giggles. 

(Had this island and circumstances truly made that bit of humour seem so hilarious to her? It seems so.) 

She opens her mouth to say something, but closes it with a grin and leans over the table to swipe a hand over and through that perfectly sculpted anime hair before grabbing her plate and twirling away to dump it in the sink. 

“Come on, you Moby Dick nerd, before we get our plush and sexy asses handed to us by a visitin’ hag or something.  
Let’s head down the stairs and grab some blankets or something so we don’t freeze on the beach.”

'But now enough that we have nests to ourselves, just enough that we have to share and be closer than what is strictly needed between friends.' 

'By God let me love you.' 

Her thoughts are a mess.

She messed up his hair. 

Fucking deplorable.  
Nobody touches the hair. 

This is unforgivable. 

He may even have to return fire. 

But he’s grateful.  
It’s a small gesture, but, the weakening of their armistice of distance (both physical and emotional) kept previously to the meal was a relief beyond words. It’s a bonus, leaving the china dirty for all its crystalline comportment. He wonders how long she’s spent in this middle finger of a house as he dumps his artlessly in the sink alongside her, his mouth lightly twisted in a scowl as he musses her swan feather hair, meticulously fixes his own. 

“Just don’t blame me when we’re inevitably caught in the rain and forced to re-enact every careening, bloated anime trope thrown our way. I can practically see before me a vast plain of inscrutable, culturally esoteric paronomasia, of subtitles five seconds behind the spoken lines and cutesy, bedridden head colds nursed instantaneously away by the fragrant ‘accidental’ breastgropage of makeshift nurses in risqué meido skirts, yet I still keep going.” 

He’s talking with his hands at this point, two hummingbirds locked in a brutal mid-flight duel to the death.  
Seems to realize it, sinks them deep deep deep into never-ending pockets. 

“I can’t decide if it’s tsundere or masochism,” he sighs, solemn as family gravestones, but leads the way back down to the sanctity of the basement 

(She makes a soft whine as he messes up her own hair after the treasonous act of her own attack on his hair. Bumping him lightly with her hip as he talked about getting caught in the rain and anime tropes involving that very thing. 

She wouldn't mind getting caught out in the rain with him again. 

Seeing that meticulously crafted and sculpted hair wet, damp, and sticking down while the water runs and pours down both of their faces. 

Having to blink over and over to keep the rain out of her eyes while she tries to see if she can pick out his from behind those shades even in the low light and through rain. 

She is almost tempted to make sure they were caught out in the rain.

A cold would be worth it. )

More like a living room  
Than the living room would ever be. 

It’s said that the human body has engineered itself to immediately forget the pain of childbirth once the child has been born, an evolutionary tactic to prevent ill will against the helpless offspring. 

One that didn’t work well enough. 

What kind of a parent summons their kid like a fucking Yu-Gi-Oh monster, as if to prove they’re but cards to play close to the chest – in some demented form of ‘bonding’ – and closer still to a full field of trap cards and backhanded compliments and monsters with a thousand lifetimes of honing thousands of ATK points. 

… Damn, that was kind of a bummer. Bomb-diggity-deep in this ‘massive buzzkill’ shiznit, yo. 

He guessed forgetting her family’s subtle, sickly-saccharine brand of all-encompassing influence on this island  
(On her)  
Was easy at times. 

The memory of the first week pushes against his ribs, and he can practically see her squeezing over the rainbow-panorama-spread of chocolate and candies they’d looted from secret boat trips to the mainland. 

They’d kicked back;  
Played some video games,  
(She’d always beat him at Smash Bros. and was a sore winner, and the shit talk was loud and loquacious.),  
Watched some movies,  
(Her eyes are spilling over. they are large and deep and sad and he feels he should already know exactly why too much to bear to pry further.)  
Shot the shit in a thousand different Rubix Cube combinations 

But never,  
Never  
Truly forgetting. 

Forgetting is good for the brain: deleting unnecessary information helps t– yadda yadda blah blah blah and the rest. 

A thick, orange fleece blanket sticks out to his mind’s eye among the pile, and he plucks it from its perch as a predator bird would a smaller bird from its nest. Yes, this would do. 

(Allllmost big enough for two, if they squeezed.)  
(Dirk Strider: professional asshole.)  
(Offer still stands for the parties, kiddos.)

She's ignorant to those thoughts of his about her mother playing her like a card, like a chess piece of little importance and yet needed enough to save just before being sacrificed. 

Maybe she's like a pet.  
No.  
Their cats are probably treated better. 

She follows Dirk down to the basement, smirking and rolling her eyes once she spots the fleece blanket he picked out from the nest they had made of every blanket and pillow they could find (or that she could steal from the other houses, it had been a bit of a rush to hear her aunt's or mother's exasperation when they realized another blanket or pillow had gone missing) 

She wrapped her arms around his neck from behind, on her toes in order to be able to properly look over his shoulder and see the blanket fully. 

Barely resisted the temptation to mess with his hair again. 

Who am I kidding, she '''''accidentally''''' flattened it when getting her arms around his neck.  
Totally an accident.  
Innocent until proven guilty you know. 

“Think we should grab another one? Two should be enough if we share, Dirkadirk dude.”

She really doesn't want to be cold. 

But she wants to be as close to him as possible much more. 

She's keeping track of every close moment they share, of every time they entangle themselves while watching a movie, or sprawl over each other while she kicks his ass at MarioKart or Smash bros.

("Aren’t you meant to be the bro here? C’mon, you’re nowhere near kickin’ my ass!”)

She's going to go through them later, at night, and smile because if she blocks out enough she can pretend that they are in love and nothing could make them unhappy. 

Except her mother.  
She wants to get out quickly.

Dammit, she’s right. It’s too cold out there for him to indulge in this seriously unsettling and sudden Playah Move. 

Playahs don’t make very good friends, 

Or anything really, besides Playahs. 

It’s sort of hard to focus with her chest against his back and the scent of her so close and the spread of her arms which have a shit ton of cute tiny blonde hairs on them over him what the fuck is he doing. 

He tries desperately not to think of her laughing face saying “boob physics” and manages to compose himself before the flush rides too far up his neck. 

Every day here he has tried to bury it, and every day it punches back upward from its grave. 

So it’s sensible and logical and with just the smallest twinge of shame that he grabs another, doesn’t even look at the color before unceremoniously loading it backwards onto Roxy’s unprotected face. Say goodnight, Gracie. 

“Also, ’Dirk-a-dirk’ is the worst product of our partnership thus far. Pretty sure that Roger Ebert would give it 0 out of 5 Eberts," he complains, running another self-reparative hand through his hair. 

He glances once around the small of the room, thinks about grabbing his phone to take some shitty Cliffside selfies with, but reconsiders. He’s trying to distance the two-friend pileup squad from his mind, not bring it to fruition, and not have the remains of his plan from the ghost-ship graveyard of his mind pulled inside-out back into reality like a starfish extruding its stomach. Fuck’s sake. 

“But, hey,” he interrupts his own thoughts, looking at Roxy with an absurdly ridiculously stern turn to his mouth. “This time you gotta promise me you won’t get jumped by surprise killer crabs. We can’t Leroy Jenkins into this, going in not knowing the fine line between our right and left butt cheeks. A fine line called the asscrack.” 

He finishes fixing her sabotage of his hair back to its usual bishōnen angles – through no small amount of effort, btw. It’s hard looking this good – and extends a hand to her on the staircase like the fucking Creation of Adam. 

He is aware of the look of the situation, and is ready to use it to the best of his ability. 

This is where the male lead says something hilarious and endearing. 

(Though he is not her male lead, not now and not before and maybe never) 

(And that's 

Okay.) 

“You can take it or leave it, butt that's the bottom line." 

Fucking nailed it.

An offended noise comes from the Lalonde at the blanket to the face. 

She rolls her eyes at his jab at her 'Dirkadirk' thing, as if. That joke was genius, pure genius, it was hard to come up with puns and jokes for his name y'know. She's even taken to writing them down when she comes up with them to remember them at a later date. 

She hasn't even filled a single page yet. 

Roxy aims a light punch at his shoulder for the crab mention, it wasn't her fault that the crab was a—  
Crabby asshole. 

Anyway. She could hardly be put at fault for the attack on her ear when the crab was such a douche nozzle that it just had to hurt her. It wasn't like she had hurt it either. 

She wraps the blanket around her shoulders, pink and orange. She likes that colour pattern, pink and orange, Dirk and Roxy, Dunkin Donuts, pink lemonade and Fanta. 

Two hearts. 

For a moment she buries the lower half of her face in the blanket. 

Phenyl ethylamine acts as a releasing agent of norepinephrine and dopamine. The first attraction causes us to produce more phenyl ethylamine, which results in those dizzying feelings associated with romantic love. Large quantities of phenyl ethylamine increase both physical and emotional energy and at the same time release more dopamine. 

The science of love is complex, but at least Roxy knows why she sometimes feels faint when she sees Dirk, and why her heart speeds up at his words, and why she chokes on her own words. 

It explains why she feels how she does when she looks at him now. With the light streaming in behind him, making him look like the best eclipse she's ever seen or heard of. Like someone holy has descended for her and her alone just to take her to the best kind of sinful heaven you've experienced. 

So perhaps her speechlessness when she takes his hand is warranted. A soft grip at first, then a firmer one to make sure her hand didn't slip from his. 

She wipes the lovelorn and awestruck from her eyes with a hard blink before she rushes passed him and drags him up the stairs. Maybe if she's fast enough he wouldn't think too much of that look in her eyes. 

"Come on then!"

He’s practically dragged –unresisting – to as close as Striders get to giddy, to sun-struck, and only with so strong of a catalyst. She is a force much like gravity, a universal constant where to resist would be as irrational as choosing not to fall if pushed off a sharp incline. Chuck Jones, eat your fucking heart out. 

Maybe this wasn’t the best train of thought to have while being led past a cliff, but who could fault him if his thoughts were a little askew? 

The Dirk watching from afar, the one who had been called Dave, once,  
the one by himself for Dirk-months and Dirk-years in the maw of a place where the air thins and grows cold, with ice hanging down his clothes, down his weldscarred hands, down his lungs and plastic heart; 

the one whose hands gripped painfully and unceasingly on any scrap of flotsam he could take a soldering iron to, whose unblinking eyes fixed on every permeation in its perfect, untouchable, perpetual machine,  
whose whispers of bitter poison like teaspoons of vinegar had retreated backward, softer and softer under the calm, frothy magenta thrash of waves that a different Dirk was approaching with Roxy on the edge of the shore, 

Was quiet. 

There is no such thing in science as a true perpetual motion engine. 

Why should there be here? 

Here, the sun is depleting, a half-circle waning purple-red drawing a crescent of fire along the edge of the water as they approach it. 

He squints against it, raises his hand as a shadow to his face to follow the path of seagulls across the ocean, over the sea, high and bright and 

Pristine 

But 

In this moment 

He feels he could touch them, if he only reached high and hard enough. 

The blanket is a cloak soft around his locked shoulders, the twist and curve of his vertebrae moot in its stiffness. 

His hand ghosts up to the shades on his face, the hand not warm in Roxy’s own. 

Porcupines are unique among the order rodentia in that they huddle together for warmth, but separate when threatened. Probably in order not to stab the shit out of each other. An unintended series of accidental ripostes. 

The shades lie heavy on his nose. 

Are these his quills? 

Were those theatre-faux smiles her own? 

He knows he wants to be there for her, for these moments that make up the backbone of her life. 

He wants to be there 

Whether it be as friend or lover. 

He wants to be there like 

Porcupines want to be softer. 

He squeezes Roxy’s hand lightly when his other one falters, dies down to his side, fingers caving in on themselves one after another like sabotaged dominoes. 

“Icarus wasn’t a dumbfuck after all, huh?”

The ocean is amazing as it always is.  
Something else for sure.  
Forever changing and forever moving, always doing something new or something different, sometimes it is calm and sometimes it is furious beyond belief. 

It has no need to hide away, conceal emotions, or anything of the sort. 

It has no need to be anything but itself. 

And that is enviable. 

But right now, with Dirk's hand in her own and blankets wrapped around their shoulders. 

She owes it no envy or jealousy. 

Instead, as she comes to a stop at one of the highest points of the cliff, she leans towards him, skilfully using her other hand to bring her blanket around them both. 

Dirk sits alongside Roxy, her blanket curling around them both like a python, his body curving into her like age-old cards bent with the love of a million hands won and a million lost. 

Maybe his poker face was strong enough to conceal that this one was a winner. 

His other hand surfaces from his pocket. 

The eighth Sphere of Paradiso is composed of the Fixed Stars, where angels are said to sleep.  
(Every other star from our viewpoint on Earth besides the Sun is said to be motionless, ‘fixed’.) 

They occasionally drift down to other tiers of Paradise, as incentive to climb higher still. 

Jupiter.  
Venus.  
The Sun. 

(She breaks through the series of firewalls and Pi hex code password-protects on Project: Sawtooth like nothing. 

Because  
He lied.  
He’d put nothing) 

She won't let go of his hand this time unless it is truly  
Strictly  
Undeniably  
Necessary. 

She looks to him in question at his words, what about this situation had brought him to the boy who flew too high and fell far below in consequence. 

A metaphor for a bubble reputation.  
Rise quickly and fall even faster.  
She leans lightly against his shoulder, side of her chin pressing against him. 

She wishes she could kiss him, she wishes she felt secure enough to even dare to try. 

She wishes he would love her like she does him. 

Like salt does meat.  
Like ice does cream.  
Like fire does oxygen. 

“What do you mean ‘bout Icarus? You feelin’ a sudden connection with him?”

“Oh, I, I meant, like, the sun. That it looked cool and shit, and I couldn’t fault him for flying too close.  
… I was just being pretentious,” he admits, the ghost of a grin on his mouth. 

(“Oh please you’re just bein’ pretentious! You’re jussst like the animemes you claim to hate, so take care of your new waifu okay? Okay bye.”) 

That night, he went to his bed to sleep, but lies there instead for hours in the dim glow of a delirium that will not slip into slumber. 

He clung to the pillow.  
It smelled like rain, and like orange Fanta and like her. 

But Jake had still been a fresh wound, like unknit flesh still granulating in a cut. 

So Not Dirk broke out a shovel, 

Tells Dirk not to give her a clumsy love of second-bests,  
That she is too fucking sweet to him for all the bitter he is back  
That there is a miscommunication on same base, chemical level that he cannot bridge  
That there is a sucrose overload, and the thick of his blood-brain barrier is the only thing keeping him from hitting the floor, catatonic 

And buries for the first time. 

Buries how the want turned to need turned to clumsy, pretentious comparison. 

Buries the guilt. 

He should have done something. 

Invited her over, made a hint, and gave her the slightest, barest most skeleton inkling of not wanting her to be alone. Sure, her family is controlling and petty and small, would probably have decided FOR her where she went, but, maybe… maybe she would’ve felt like someone gave a shit about what happens to her on this island full of nit-pick backstab cannibalism. Felt like someone gives a shit about her. 

Sometimes he thinks he can see the exhaustion in her shoulders, as if releasing all ebbings of hope, as if some sudden realization, some dreadful way that her life had expanded before her with all the broken promises of childhood and coming illnesses of old age and had punched downward into her head. 

People around you move without purpose.  
What purpose is there to move?  
You will never get what you want, and your heart grows tired of trying. 

He knows what it’s like. 

He wants her to know he knows what it’s like and before he knows it he’s taking a breath. 

His voice is sotto voce against the crisp cool of the shore side breeze. 

“Hey, what would you normally do here, alone? My summers fucking sucked before this one. So, I’m not gonna pity you for. Whatever you wanna say. 

But, I want to know. If you’re okay telling me.”

She curls with and against him, trying to seem like she doesn't want to entangle herself entirely with him but also trying to seem as though she wouldn't mind if they did. 

Her free hand falls in her lap, picking at the cloth of her skirt and leggings. There are a few accidental tears and rips here and there on the black, thin, and fragile cloth of her leggings from both use and those nails of hers. Seriously, you don't need a lot of pressure to accidentally put your nail through them, they are that weak. 

Weak as the connection between her, her mother and her aunt. 

Weak as the blood that flows between the three that is meant to bind them together but instead simply ensnares Roxy and gives them a measure of control over who she is. 

Weak like her knees after she saw Dirk still wet from the rain in his apartment with that Rainbow Dash body pillow. 

Weak like how she feels every time she cannot say, spell, or convey in the slightest that she,  
Roxy Lalonde,  
Heiress of the Lalondes,  
Hot shit h4xx0r,  
Plain old Roxy,  
Is in love with her best friend, Dirk Strider. 

The fact that she cannot tell him, for the words stop in her throat and choke her like a well-manicured hand around her throat, that she has never wanted anything, 

Or anyone 

As much as she wants him to love her like she does him. 

That she wants him to put his arms around her and hold her like the world will try to take her away and he would do anything to stop that from happening. 

That she wants to be able to hold him like someone will attempt to separate them but she will never let someone else do that. 

That she wants them to kiss like the beautiful and powerful gods that they could be. 

That they are. 

That they might be. 

At his question however, her thoughts stall. Like someone suddenly put a goddamn wall or pole there when her thoughts were walking and /no/ that wall/pole had not been there before you shut the fuck up. 

“Well mostly, I, uh, just kinda…” 

The truth, Roxy. 

Don't sugar coat these things. 

“I waited for the summer to end most days, to be honest, an’ I took the motorboat out to get away from the island. When I couldn’t steal away long enough to do that, I guess I watched movies, played games, tried to avoid mom and my aunt ‘long as I could.” 

She fiddles with the tag on a blanket, worries it between her fingers in an echo of what Dirk had done earlier. Like a talisman for good luck.  
“Drank too, I guess, wasn’t much else to do unless I wanted to ‘socialise’ with my family. I used to spend time with Rose, but, well… Things have gone downhill a bit. And then of course I’ve messaged you guys.” 

“To be honest… Most of the time I was just here, thinkin’ ‘bout shit, y’know, try’na sort stuff out.” 

Stuff like whether she will ever be able to tell Dirk that she is so in love with him that he is generally the first person she thinks of in the morning. That he is the one she thinks of checking up on and messaging when she wakes, when she's bored, even in the middle of doing something important he just pops up in her mind. 

She twists her body slightly, to face him a bit more and brings her hand to lay on his chest, fingers curling into his shirt once again. 

It's almost intimate. 

Close as she'll get.

“Most of that sounds like balls.”

Dirk fights the urge to apologize. To make up for lost time. To make up for the isolation.

He knows she won’t want him to say sorry, to all but confirm that she’s victim and maiden and princess caught in the jaw of a ravenous thing with razor teeth and empty eyes and a growl that shakes the marrow from bones.

But how do you apologize to someone for all the things they never had?  
For the people who weren’t the people they could’ve been.  
For all the things they deserved, all the things that were passed up from them after such a rough cut of the asshole deck.

***  
It was 3 AM, his hands steady and coated in a fine mist of metal flechettes as his phone unleashed a flood of pink text he had to scroll a solid ten seconds upward through to get to the beginning of. 

It’d been a long-standing pattern. She knew he was awake, and he knew he wasn’t doing anything important.

(As if anything could be more important.)

He answers with as much calm as he can.  
With as much maturity as he can, as he says it’s okay to want to cope.  
With as much empathy as he can, as he says she is strong for being able to vent and confront it.

With as much feigned humanity as he can,  
As he repeats another line he read somewhere.

He is an awful person

But he is trying not to be.

***

He knew she had bad days. Ones she couldn’t spitfire quip and bubble-laugh away, no matter what she wanted other people to think. Ones where the siren’s call of submerging into something softer than years of expectation like gravity doubled, or softer than summers upon summers of two-faced dialogues, where bearing false teeth in a falser smile was met with roaring applause.

Who could blame her for lying about it? For drinking. For wanting to blur the edges of the harsh of her family, of the people who were supposed to accept and love her the most.

Maybe he would’ve done the same in her position, if he wasn’t so neurotic and paranoid. So scared shitless of not being in full, perpetual control of his environment that it sent him scrabbling in the other direction.  
Lucidity. Walls of words, tall, stone, the ivory of towers like tales of prince’s kisses, obsidian like glass against moonless midnight. Perfectly spiked hair, immaculate neutrality, the flawless cool guy with flawless sunglasses.

It’s with such careful construction that the most beautiful buildings are formed.

 

So he won’t apologize. Because she is still here and still fighting and there is still so much he doesn’t know.

There is a void in her life that she’s had to be tough to get through.

But maybe he understands a little better now, as he feels her settle against him, her hand hot on his chest against the cool of the ocean.  
He allows himself to settle against her in turn, the crook of his arm pulling her waist close.

“I don’t even know how you deal with it all, honestly. I can barely handle my dad being away.”

(She messages him through the speaker of his newest robo-boombox and he startles and drops a wrench.

She laughs and he feels the bounce even in the heavy air of his workshop.

She was always closing distances, for all his careful construction of them.)

……

It’s getting darker, he tells himself. Can barely see shit in this Stygian fucking squalor.

It is without fanfare or a chorus from empyrean angels or the rending asunder of the cosmos that he slowly, calmly plucks the sunglasses from his face, tucks them deep in his pockets. In the seconds that follow, he waits for some great object to fall from the sky and smash his head open for the transgression, but none comes. 

Logically, objectively, he knows nothing has happened, except that his pupils dilate in what little excess the dying sunset holds onto.

“You’re fucking amazing.”

His words and actions are casual, he hopes. Casual like fucking breakfast.

It’s the tell-tale movement of his hand and the disappearance of the shades that shocks her more than the fact that he didn't say a word of what she did to cope with her family.

To cope with a lack of connection with her family, where there should be lines to form a family tree, where there should be sincere birthday wishes and not being told over and over again that if she wants to be a Lalonde, if she wants anything out of this family, she has to be perfect and better than what she is, there is a void.

There is always a void with Roxy, but as much as she thinks on it she won't let herself become a helpless victim if she must be a victim at all. She won't allow it to make it seem like it is holding her underwater, if she must drown then she will do so with a smile as water is pumped into her lungs to make it seem like she isn't drowning at all.

No one can say she is drowning if no one else sees the water.

She almost closes her eyes, to daydream that this is something romantic, but with her summers and heart almost completely laid out bare on a metal table while some coroner cuts her open to figure her out, she feels like closing her eyes would make her too comfortable and too eager to say something that could ruin the tranquillity of what this is.

So instead she shakes her head and gives a genuine smile at his words, hoping that perhaps he would not see the pink in her cheeks that was caused by three simple words.

Three words can do a lot of things.

I love you, you're fucking amazing.

Her thoughts just cannot help but try to ruin these moments.

Go make some bumping beats instead of trying to kill her with sad damnit.

“You’re just sayin’ that, Dirk, the only amazin’ person here, right now, is you.”

"Even if you wear shades twenty-four, six."

Of course she assumes one day is allotted for no shades time.

She tilts her head up to look at him, eyes scanning his features, jaw, mouth, nose, brow and eyes.

Those eyes.

Heart stopping, ice melting, knee quaking, gorgeous eyes.

He's going to be the death of her one day.

Metaphorically.

Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia is the scientific term for brain freeze, and it can happen outside of ice cream.

The brain treats rejection like physical pain.

Porcupines huddle for warmth but separate in the face of a threat.

A million facts run through his head to distract from the fact that he has never wanted to both steal the breath and run away from a person more. He immediately goes stiff, his peripherals now immeasurably valuable, since he can never look her directly in the face again. 

She’s staring. Every muscle in his body misses its central pump for the seconds she’s silent.

Fuck. Is he weirding her out with all these poignant Hallmark moments. Maybe this was a mistake.

Maybe his perfect hair is made of quills because that’s how it was meant to be. 

He knows all this is silly. That she was joking, that the “amazing, BUT” sentiment was the product of his obsessive over analysis, but he feels ashamed regardless, that it has taken him this long for something so seemingly basic.

It’s casual. People pull this delirious business all the time. Uniform shit.  
He’s cool.  
Cooler than being cool.  
Ice cold.  
(Alright alright alright alright)

Someone better break out the hacksaw for all these blackened appendages.

Dirk blinks quickly, shifting unconsciously away from Roxy, his other hand rubbing up a storm on the back of his neck. Shit’s like an intensive home-remedy chiropractic technique. Through the chill, he can feel baking heat sinking into the bare skin around his eyes.

“Just, thought, wow, it would suck to… not be able to document this tropical fucking sunset without the anime Instagram filter. It was just really, like, not… not doing it for my inner artist.” 

Pause. The wind had picked up, and clouds were scudding across the face of the moon.

“Spectrum of color not, like, representin’,” he elaborates. “I’d miss out on some important shit like those seagulls over there and that craggy set of rocks that looks like Danny Devito and you and, pretty much a lot, so, yeah,” he trails off, settling into incoherence, his tongue moving against his teeth without forming words.

He reaches into his pocket, his free hand clasping the shades; they are familiar and reassuring, though normally to a different part of him. This will have to do for now.

Her fingers uncurl from his shirt, hand moving to go around his waist as she tilts her head away and actually pays more of her attention to the scenery in front of them rather than all the ways that Dirk Strider makes a surprisingly still existing heart panic and beat like never before. A chuckle comes from her at the way he speaks, though she worries she's made him feel...

Nervous? Uncomfortable? Weirded out?

All three?

She shakes her head, surely he'd say, surely he would say something if she had made him feel a certain way. 

Then again, maybe he wouldn't and that is why he shifted from her. Maybe she should stop clinging to him like she is, maybe she should hide her emotions better than she already is even if she is trying so damn hard to not ruin this friendship of theirs. 

So her arms retract and she sits up properly, arms above her head to stretch and back arched to crack and pop just like so before she brings her knees up to her chest and wraps her arms around them. 

Despite her worry, this is probably the second most relax she has felt in all her summers, the ocean, blankets, sound of life in the world, a nice distance between them and her mother. In truth, everything here is nothing but comfort for Roxy. It feels good to have nothing to worry about, to feel at home even when she's far away from it and trying to make Dirk seem more than worthy to her family when it comes to those unavoidable confrontations.

At the very least no bottles had been smashed against any of the houses so far.

“To be honest, I think that looks more like Jack Black than it does Danny Devito, somethin’ ‘bout that base.”  
You know I’m all about that bass, ‘bout that bass, no treble. 

He's all sunshine and honey, cinnamon in some kind of warm and sweet drink. Well-deserved fanta after acquiring and protecting a MLP body pillow from a torrential downpour. Sunrises and sunsets where the light hits the water just right and both the sky and ocean are mixes of dark blues, oranges and pinks. He's the orange portal in a game where there is no cake except maybe he is the real prize in the long run because he is just so wonderful.

Lovable.

But maybe she's just needy.

“I wasn’t kiddin’ before when I said you were the sweetest, Dirk, for your information.” She feels it important to convey that once again. "What do you want most in the world right now?"

The tension in Dirk’s shoulders slowly unwinds from him as Roxy averts her attention and their distance goes from intimate to companionable. The hand which went searching through his pocket stops, stills, falls back to support him just like his other as he leans back, takes in the blossoming pinpricks of stars behind deep purples of cloud.

He doesn’t know whether it’s from the fact that the breeze is tickling his exposed collarbone through his ill-chosen-for-the-cold tank-top, that she’s being casual about his melodramatic face-unveiling, her usual effect on him, or if it’s from the lack of his shades feeling like manacles coming off, bonds on his ankles sawed away into nothing but the distant memory of once-chafing welts, 

But it’s easier to laugh now.  
So he does.

“That settles it, we’re gonna have to watch Nacho Libre when we get back,” he jokes, breathes in the breeze and the companionable silence that follows. 

His line of sight 

Drifts 

To the other houses, regal and astute, empty for all their furnishings  
To the line of lights from the mainland glimmering along the horizon,  
To the ocean, nursing the shoreline like a wound,  
Back to her.

For all its thorns, there were so many beautiful things on this island.  
Like flowers that have survived in bad soil.  
Candles that burn in a smothering dark.  
Pinpricks of stars in the dull sheetrock of space.  
A hurricane of pink text in blank, beige backgrounds.

Suddenly, she’s speaking. Compliments, affirmations, sweet-talks, who knows. All he knows is he’s left speechless and scrambling for something to say back to turn this on its head, to make light of the gravitas in his stomach until she talks again; a question this time. 

He narrowly skirts from exposing the fresh, almost insidiously deep glint of a part of him that says her, again and again.

Or at least once, like, pretty fucking loudly. 

But it is a small, quiet thing; impossibly covert and lying low, caught in an undertow of other things better left unsaid. Roxy would need a seismograph to detect it, probably. 

His eyebrows knit together. They are thin and sharp and the kind of ice blond that leads people’s minds to albinism and vampires and Draco Malfoy. The saving grace is that he doesn’t stroke his chin like some asshole trying to play the part via The Thinker, sans marble. One of his hands idly pulls up tufts of fraying grass. 

Not Dirk wants to say a lot of things for him.  
But honestly, fuck that guy.

“Mostly that Jane and Jake were here seeing all this with us. Sure, it’d probably get annoying watching them craft new and brutally inventive ways of PDAing up and down this place, but at least then you’d kick someone else’s ass at Mario Kart besides me. And… that way, it wouldn’t feel like us against the world, y’know?” he says, fond in his disparagement of their mutual friends, but with a sober twist to his voice at the end.

 

“I can’t lie though, it’s pretty cool with just the two of us doing stuff like this. Sharing some more private moments and all. Comrades in arms against asinine assclownery, amirite.”

"Oh yeah, def’ right here on the front lines battlin’ ‘gainst the tyranny of the Lalonde Royal family of fuckassery island and the mansions of imported French granite.”

She snorted lightly and flopped onto her back, smiling slightly at the mention of Jake and Jane. She wished she had of brought them too, but maybe the alone time with Dirk was worth it. Kicking his ass at Mario Kart certainly was, if there was one thing in the world that she would willingly do continuously until the end of time it was kicking Dirk's ass at any Nintendo game she could get her hands on.

She stared up at the sky, counting stars and randomly guessing the distance between them and the Earth based on their brightness. Sadly, none of those stars were exactly 69.420 kilometres away from the surface of the Earth.

"Havin’ Janey and Jakey here woulda been pretty nice to be honest, evn if they woulda been all over each other like a hundred snakes in one of their freaky snake orgies, limbs all entangled like- ugh, ugh" she rolled onto her stomach, and rested her head on her arms to look at Dirk. Blonde hair falling over her eyes soon enough to block her vision however, prompting her to try and blow it out of her eyes before letting it blind her for an eternity and then some. 

She wondered what it would have been like if, perhaps, their families had been swapped around. If Dirk had gotten her mother and aunt and she instead got his brother, she wondered if she might have of been just like him, a mechanic with a liking towards anime and kids shows. She wondered if he would have of liked cats and been finally be actually skilled at video games like she was. If he would have of hacked into the robots she made to take a look at what she was doing and if she would have of had a crush on the English boy and if he would have of been utterly in love with her like she was with him right now. Wondered if she would have been here as his guest and he would have been lying on the ground having these very thoughts instead of her. 

Maybe, just maybe, not much would have changed at all. Or maybe Dirk would have functioned better in her home than she did, or maybe she would have of worked better with his absent father. Or maybe they would be as terrible as they were now, and maybe Roxy would have of ignored phone calls like he did and maybe Dirk would have of gotten drunk like she did and wake up one the cold tiles of the bathroom floor before sending paragraphs of bright orange or pink text to her.

Maybe they would have of been just as sick, just as needy and starved of love as they were right now.

"I dunno what I want most in the world, but I think what would be pretty good right now is probs two thousand cats an’ maybe a ticket out of this place" 

They both fall silent after that. Soon huddling together and entangling limbs like two best friends who had been isolated together for eight years with guardians gone and off in their own worlds only could. 

Like best friends who were trapped on an island together with only two [2] other caustic women and one [1] cousin off in her own world could.

Like two best friends,  
Secretly crashing their own hopes,  
Of there being more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> since this is extra long do you forgive me for not updating in eighty years even though it end how it does


End file.
